Rovi Corporation, driving digital entertainment innovation, today announced that the DivX digital rights management (DRM) used with the company’s adaptive streaming format, has been approved by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) for streaming use within the UltraViolet ecosystem. With the DivX DRM becoming part of the UltraViolet technology specification, DivX Plus Streaming® may be easily used by UltraViolet retailers to deliver a consistently high quality over-the-top video streaming experience. DECE is the developer and operator of UltraViolet, which is designed to offer consumers unprecedented freedom and flexibility in how they watch and collect home entertainment.
DivX Plus Streaming brings features historically associated with Blu-ray Discs to the over-the-top entertainment experience. The adaptive streaming solution not only dynamically adjusts streams to help deliver maximum visual quality based on available bandwidth, but also offers an advanced feature set with support for 1080p, subtitles, multiple language tracks, and trick-play functions such as smooth fast forward and rewind.
The addition of DivX DRM to DECE’s list of approved stream protection technologies continues the momentum for DivX Plus Streaming, which has been approved by studios and adopted by a range of companies that are helping fuel over-the-top entertainment distribution, including Broadcom, China Mobile, Dixons, MediaTek, MediaMarkt, and MStar.
“UltraViolet is gaining market traction with more than 8 million household accounts, thousands of titles available, new retailer launches and hundreds of millions of compatible devices,” said Mark Teitell, general manager of DECE – the pan-industry consortium behind UltraViolet. “As a Founder of DECE, Rovi has had a substantial impact on the initial design and development of UltraViolet – and its expertise and capabilities across content creation, access and playback are now helping to further accelerate UltraViolet in the marketplace.”
In addition to providing core DRM technology, Rovi is also powering some of the first UltraViolet-enabled retail services. For a major studio and leading US retailer, Rovi’s end-to-end solution for digital entertainment distribution, Rovi Entertainment Store, is enabling integrated UltraViolet account creation and linking, purchase history and code redemption, disc-to-digital redemptions, as well as digital locker management and device streaming. As a result, consumers are able to view and access their UltraViolet collections, regardless of where movie purchases were made, directly within the library of their favorite retail service.
Rovi is also supporting UltraViolet through its professional video encoding solutions. TotalCode™ Enterprise, a server-distributed encoding solution for high-volume digital content production, will be one of the first commercially available workflow tools to support the preparation of movies in the downloadable UltraViolet Common File Format (CFF). In addition, Rovi plans to support CFF encoding and multiplexing in its popular line of MainConcept SDKs.
“We developed DivX Plus Streaming as a way to address the limitations of existing digital streaming solutions on the market and to elevate the over-the-top entertainment experience for consumers,” said Matt Milne, executive vice president worldwide sales and marketing, Rovi Corporation. “We share DECE’s vision of entertainment freedom for consumers and are delighted that DivX Plus Streaming has been selected as a technology to support UltraViolet retailers looking to deliver a consistently high-quality viewing experience.”
Rovi’s DivX Plus Streaming solution is built upon core DivX technologies, which are recognized by millions of consumers around the world for delivering excellent video performance, visual quality and multi-screen interoperability. DivX Plus Streaming Certification rigorously tests and validates interoperability between entertainment services and devices to provide an optimal consumer experience. DivX Plus Streaming expands the value of the popular DivX and DivX Plus® HD Certification programs, which bring advanced multimedia features to ‘download to own’ video content and have resulted in shipment by top-tier manufacturers of more than 750 million consumer electronics devices.
