Rovi Corp. will acquire Sonic Solutions for $720m.
Sonic itself had just bought DivX last June. This deal of amalgamating connected TV services means Rovi can offer more content-related services to cable companies and TV makers and more opportunity with studios and retailers like Best Buy.
You may remember Rovi as Macrovision who sold embedded content-security technology. The Rovi name (changed last July) is “Macrovision” minus the first three and last four letters but plus digital entertainment steroids. The company made a plan to add a wider vision to their content security business and has executed it wonderfully.
In 2008, it bought the American Gemstar-TV Guide and then divested the famous TV Guide magazine, TV Guide Network, TV Guide Online, TV Games Network for lots of cash.
After that Rovi acquired Muze, BD+, All Media Guide, and now Sonic.
The Rovi portfolio, pre-Sonic, included:
* Approximately 111 million subscribers and 91 million CE devices worldwide use their guidance technology
* Their content protection technology is on approximately 9 billion DVDs and Blu-ray discs
* More than 500 million devices are enabled with their protection technology
* They have active advertising rights in place with approximately 121 million guides worldwide
* They have a vast and unique catalog of entertainment metadata for TV, movies, music and games that includes:
o More than 1.2 million TV Series episodes since 1954
o More than 1.8 million Pop and Classical music albums and 16 million tracks
o More than 430,000 movie titles
With Sonic, Rovi adds RoxioNow (formerly CinemaNow but hey, does that become RoviNow?) with more than 27,000 movies and TV shows for connected TVs and Blu-ray players. And it gets Sonic DivX software with its base of 350m consumer electronics devices.
With all that accumulated position in content protection, delivery and indexing, there's also the sleeper business that may bring Rovi into the headlights of Google, Yahoo, Apple and other giants.
Rovi provides advertising services to its aggregated installed base of connected devices that is now formidable in size.
If Rovi can add search+advertising to its business, now that would indeed be a Sonic boom.
Go Rovi
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