www.drmwatch.com/watermarking/article.php/3711376
By Bill Rosenblatt November 15, 2007 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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