DRM giant locks doors to publishing clients

With the sale of eMeta, announced on Monday, Macrovision completes the disposal of what it has already described as a discontinued operation. In reality the eMeta offering never fitted well with the Macrovision portfolio. At first glance, their access management and content monetisation platform seemed a good fit with the Macrovision DRM and copy protection portfolio, but clearly this has not been the case.

The real issue here, it seems to me, is that the market for the eMeta platform remained firmly rooted in the publishing and information provision sectors. The promise held out by the acquisition was that the software platform could reach out to other sectors where Macrovision was already strong. Had this happened, it would have delivered excellent leverage on the $35m price Macrovision paid for eMeta.

In practice it seems the business models provided by the eMeta platform were hard coded to the early online economics of the publishing industry, an industry still wedded to subscription-based models and paid content access. Perhaps this was an insufficiently flexible basis to allow the platform to break free from the shackles of its publishing heritage.

One could interpret the sale as a sign of resilient heath in the online publishing sector, leading to a more consolidated position amongst service providers. The reality is more likely to be that this was a fire-sale acquisition, allowing Macrovision to focus its core strategy at a time of increasing economic uncertainty.