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macrovision

Rovi, formerly Macrovision, announces Liquid media guide

Macrovision, best known for its digital rights management software, officially changed its name today to Rovi. To celebrate, the company announced a new media guide, code named "Liquid." According to the press release, Liquid will merge television, Internet, and personal multimedia content into a single, sleek graphical interface. Rovi plans on releasing the guide to consumer electronics manufacturers in early 2010.

The media guide is broken up into three basic areas. First off is a FiOS-like interactive guide to broadcast TV, which appears to offer extensive information and playback options. The second major component will offer broadband services … Read more

Loeb Partners weighs in against Macrovision-Gemstar merger

Investment firm Loeb Partners announced Thursday plans to vote against copy-protection developer Macrovision's $2.8 billion acquisition of Gemstar-TV Guide International.

While Loeb Partners and its affiliates hold a small 2.1 percent stake in Macrovision, it's calling on other investors to weigh in and push the company hard on explaining its rationale for the deal. Macrovision is in the business of developing digital rights management technologies and content protections, while Gemstar-TV, in which News Corp. holds a 41 percent stake, offers entertainment guides.

"In light of the fact that Macrovision has failed in certain other expensive … Read more

TiVo and JVC copy-protection follow-up

There's still no word on whether the TiVo Series3 will be seeing a price cut in the near future. But in the meantime, it's worth visiting an issue that cropped up during our testing of the box back in the fall of 2006. At that time, we noticed that the Series3 analog-video outputs exhibited some strange behavior when connected to JVC A/V receivers via HDMI--essentially, the composite and S-video outputs wouldn't work when playing back recordings that were flagged as "restricted" by the content provider.

Both TiVo and JVC have since followed up on … Read more