Whyos

I don’t know a lot about Macrovision, aside from the fact that most games and movies distributed on physical media use their DRM protection, and that this technology is at the core of their value. –they’ve been doing this since VHS, and last year, they acquired the DRM technology used on Blu-ray disks. This puts them at the very center of a business that will likely plateau sometime in the next few years.

Lately, Macrovision have done a few things that, seen from outside, seem just a bit odd. Earlier this year, they sold off Trymedia, an entity whose business consists of two parts; DRM for downloadable games, and an aggregated offering of conventional games available for download (with an emphasis on their own DRM, but not exclusive to it). Then, in April, they also got rid of their (downloadable) business software unit. And they’ve just sold eMeta, a download and subscription service that they bought a while ago.

It’s easy to understand why an entity whose core product is entirely dependent upon physical media would develop and acquire technology to bring them along into digital distribution, a little harder to understand why they’d then shed every one of these entities.

Could it be simply that download DRM will always be a significantly different and much less attractive business than its disk-based equivalent?  This is probably true to some extent: With disks, a DRM provider can enable a dynamic in which hardware is manufactured in compliance with their technology, and there’s real potential for and benefit to a near monopolistic position. With downloadable technology, the content provider benefits much more from multiple technical solutions, as the more there are, the more work a hacker community will need to do to get access to all of the content-owner’s product. It may have been simply that Macrovision’s financial picture looked so bleak earlier this year that they decided to trim non-core businesses. –But, that still makes it clear that downloadable DRM is not core for them.

It’s certainly just as significant that as more is happening on the server side of things with applications, including games, locking up that content may have diminishing value. I think that this is the most interesting possibility.