Macrovision
announced last week that it has agreed to acquire All Media Guide Holdings (AMG).
Like its close competitor Gracenote, AMG has a powerful combination of two core
assets: a huge, continuously-updated database of information about music and
other content, and an acoustic fingerprinting technology that links actual music
tracks to information about them. AMG's LASSO fingerprinting solution is used in
Sony's PlayStation 3 and home media server products, as well as by CD conversion
services.
This acquisition puts Macrovision fully into the fast-growing content
identification market, which will be synergistic to its existing anti-piracy
solutions and will help it compete with other antipiracy service providers such
as BayTSP. Such synergies ought to make up for the fact that LASSO is not
one of the most popular music recognition technologies for user-generated
content sites or P2P networks; the leaders there are Audible Magic and Gracenote
(whose music recognition technology was
acquired two yeas ago from Philips Content Identification).
Macrovision is making this move shortly after having discontinued its CD copy
protection product line; this is further evidence of the broad move in digital
rights technologies from active technologies (encryption) to content
identification technologies like fingerprinting and watermarking. We would
expect that Macrovision will follow its AMG acquisition with one in the video
fingerprinting space once that technology, now experimental, becomes more stable
and viable.
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