The future of Macrovision

January 14, 2005

The Register conducted an interview with the VP of marketing for Macrovision, Adam Gervin. The interview focuses on the future of Macrovision and where they believe they will fit into the DRM field over the next few years as we move into the HD disc formats of HD DVD and Blu-Ray. Here is a quote from the article:

The concerns we put to him were three fold.The first issue is that the two High Definition DVD standards (Blu-ray and HD DVD) are looking to embrace new content protection technologies, which means Macrovision's might be less useful. And with 55 per cent of Macrovision's revenue based on DVD protection royalties, that's no joke.

The second is that the recent reluctance and even hostility of Apple to open up Fairplay to connect to other DRM's put Macrovision's stated intent for its CDS 300 to be able to handshake with Fairplay, in danger. The third is that its new Hawkeye system for protecting music and films from free distribution around the P2P systems on the internet, may well be compromised by the emergence of newer P2P systems that work differently, using hash checking to ensure people are stealing the right file.

According to the article, Macrovision is not very worried about the yet-to-be-decided DRM method that will be the standard for HD DVD and/or Blu-Ray. At the current moment, there is a lot of discussion regarding the successor to CSS, which is named AACS (Advanced Access Content System). If I was Macrovision, I would be intensely concerned over the battle for DRM standards on HD DVD and Blu-Ray. It doesn't make sense that they are not concerned with this topic, since 55% of their revenues is currently based on DVD content protection royalties. Gervin believes that DVDs will have 5 years or longer of continued growth. That prediction might be a little optomistic, especially when Blu-Ray recorders are slated to launch this year. Is this the end of Macrovision protection?

They also discussed the use of Macrovisions' new
"Hawkeye" systems. In theory, this protection system will be used to distribute
DRM protected content over the current highly popular peer 2 peer networks.
While these files are not "fake" files as others we have seen in the past, they
will still probably frustrate the end user on peer 2 peer networks. The Hawkeye
protected files will redirect a user or give the user an option to purchase the
content in a legal manner. Can this be successful in any way? Or will there be
newer Peer to Peer systems that simply filter out Hawkeye content... If
you're interested in reading the full article, head on over to the Register to check it out.

Source: The Register