We have to admit that the merger of Gemstar and Macrovision into some kind of future TV platform under the brand of Rovi, was always something we saw as far-fetched and unlikely to happen in a meaningful way, but with the addition in recent weeks of Sonic Solutions this has forced us to re-appraise the company and still we see more mist that out and out strategy. But we thought that perhaps if we looked hard enough, we might see a picture of a deeper strategy emerging.
This week it has talked about porting its Connected Platform to the Android platform. The Rovi Connected Platform seems to us a mere pre-requisite to offering any kind of system for content management in the home. You have to have software which will deliver the use cases of the DLNA, and this is more or less the Rovi version of that software. The idea is that consumer electronics manufacturers have enough to focus on, and they want to borrow a design for content interaction complete with its own UI, format and file conversion and management, not build their own.
So far most of the Android and iPad stuff from Rovi has been about showing people what’s on TV, and relies on the knowledge of its listings database. This week for instance it added an iPad application called ‘What’s On TV’, a free, mobile television listings app with a difference, it knows what’s on where you are based, so varies it from US State to US State.
And on Google TV last May Rovi stood up and put its TotalGuide navigation onto the device. That’s all about merging different video sources onto a single EPG and populating it with data.
The Connected Platform let’s a home user make a link between local PCs so that music, photos and video files can be shared between devices, and this week’s announcement is merely that it now includes Android portable devices in that eco-system. They should now be able to swap content with digital TVs, set-top boxes, digital video recorders, Windows 7 PCs and network-attached storage devices. The Android App will also give the consumer remote management capabilities.
But right now this is not about commercial content, this is about content which does not have to be protected, either because you own it or because someone has already stripped it of its protection when it was downloaded from the internet. Either way system like these, are, as we say, the pre-requisite to the digital home and need that final step, which is the implementation of DTCP-IP on key devices.
Most readers of this publication will know already that this is a DLNA endorsed streaming protection protocol which is reliant on a hardware assist. It doesn’t actually need a hardware based key, but so far the US studios have said, ‘Let’s see how it goes in hardware first and then we’ll consider software only.’
The thing that this will enabled you to do is stream content from your set top, where commercial content is encrypted, to any mainstream device, including Android handsets or Tablets. You can do this already if your device has a DTCP-IP chip in it, but so far there is no DLNA software certification which covers this encrypted stage. DLNA just got around to bringing out a software certification, but it doesn’t cover DTCP-IP and won’t for perhaps two more years.
The fact that Rovi is offering pretty much to manage this process for its existing CE clients covering DLNA, UPnP, DTCP-IP, and OCAP/tru2way-compliant devices, is a major plus. Why not license its software stack and be one of the first to understand a genuine world of DRM interoperability, the day it gets approved. Obviously where a critical piece of equipment needs DTCP-IP, and it has the pre-requisite hardware assist, it looks like the Rovi software can manage that for you now.
It’s unlikely it will be for the likes of Sony, Samsung and Panasonic, who would all want to do that themselves, but it could be for anyone below that first tier and it even talks about the Connected Platform being enough of a middleware stack to build multi-room DVRs around it.
But where Rovi may have an appeal among pay TV operators themselves, and the way this can be made to work even with devices from top tier CE manufacturers, is the work that it is now doing in the cloud with its Rovi Media Cloud. This is pretty much the same approach that both TiVo has had for some time, and which NDS launched in its own Snowflake-MediaHighway, UI-Middleware combination ‘ and that is taking recommendation, addressable advertising and search out to the cloud, and offer it as part of a subscription.
Rovi boasts that Rovi Media Cloud operators ‘can provide a unique and compelling experience and deliver it across multiple platforms and devices. Rovi Media Cloud services currently include advertising, data, management, media recognition, recommendations and search.’
NDS has already had a launch at Zon Multimedia’s TV Cabo in Portugal and another design win that hasn’t yet seen the light of day at Liberty global. TiVo has wins in Europe at Virgin Media, Canal Digital and Ono in Europe and Cox, Charter, RCN, and Suddenlink in the US.
It looks to us that the Rovi cloud apps have a natural affinity for Google and Android and it can only be a matter of time before it gets its own operator wins which put it in this same category, which would put those companies in a three way fight as comprehensive OTT systems suppliers. While individual set top and CE manufacturers continue to only be able to address part of the digital home and OTT issues. Obviously these all need to address the issue of TV app stores more directly, because these are being attacked mostly by TV makers and in particular Samsung, which last week said it has now passed the 2 million TV App download mark.
Rovi says that its Media Cloud is run from redundant servers, held in data centers in West and Central US, and already in Europe, and use a distributed caching architecture to speed them up. It also says that it has developed the back end of its advertising system so that they can be managed for operators, from sales and campaign management to traffic and audience measurement. It also comes with in built media recognition to fingerprint content so that it can have rich data added which helps search and also helps describes the content.
Not only have we not seen all of this relatively new software working together in a single installation, there are no operators that are relying on Rovi platforms from top to bottom, but we suspect that it can manage without that, and fit one or another single relevant component in at numerous customers before it finds a customer that will take the whole shooting match. But it has certainly done enough to convince the investment community that it is worth the money to pay for Sonic Solutions, this week it raised some $730 million net from a Senior Secured Credit Facility financing which will also fund some stock repurchases and some debt recycling.
All that remains is for Rovi is to come up with a viable strategy for integrating Sonic Solutions into the mix and the company will be unrecognizable from the two contributing parties to the merger, one which offered content protection and the other which after more than a decade of fighting in patent infringement courtrooms, stopped suing its potential client base and proved its EPG patent was both essential and different enough for it to become an almost global standard.