The deal with Widevine is part of a strategy that CinemaNow has been pursuing for a few years as a means of differentiating its movie and TV show download service from competitors like iTunes and Movielink (now Blockbuster).  Back in 2005, CinemaNow partnered with a software company called Digital 5 to enable consumers who downloaded content through CinemaNow's website to transfer that content to various devices on their personal networks.  Digital 5 was acquired in 2006 by its competitor Mediabolic, which in turn was acquired by Macrovision early last year.

The Digital 5 integration worked as long as the endpoint devices supported Digital 5's technology and the content was originally protected in Windows Media DRM.  CinemaNow's addition of Widevine's DRM to its technology makes it possible to use content on a wider variety of devices and in a wider variety of formats. 

Deals like this make sense as long as there is no dominant player in the home media network platform sweepstakes -- which is certainly the case now. Even three years after CinemaNow's deal with Digital 5, the market for home media interoperability products is still uncertain and fragmented, with vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and various legacy conditional access technology providers vying for dominance. 

Meanwhile, Widevine has been successful as a provider of security technology from pay-TV/IPTV head ends to consumer gateway devices such as set-top boxes and (increasingly) PCs.  Widevine is trying to break through the gateway device barrier and become a widely installed technology in the digital home.  Its multiplatform DRM technology is not enough by itself; deals like this one with an actual service provider -- with licenses to thousands of major-studio content items -- are necessary to give it the momentum it needs.  Widevine's strategy is predicated on the desirability of cross-platform DRM, so it should be positioned well as long as the market remains fragmented; judging from recent history, this should be a while.