Rovi Corporation Acquires Sonic Solutions For $720M

Rovi Corporation has decided to spread it tentacles wider in the digital home solutions market place with the acquisition of Sonic Solutions. Both companies made the joint announcement last week that the Rovi will acquire Sonics in through a combination of stocks and shares worth about $720 million US dollars. With the acquisition of Sonic Rovi has stepped into the digital video processing, playback and distribution technologies.

Over the last three years Sonic has steadily improve and expands its services to become a key supplier of software to businesses wanting to distribute their digital content and manufacturers wanting to integrated HD content playback into their devices.  The company has collaborated with LG to provide movie download and the RoxioNow platform was licensed by the developers of Boxee. Another popular product is their DivX media player solution.

 Their RoxioNow cloud solution has a catalogue of over 100,000 movies and television programs, is well known to manufacturers of connected consumer electronics (CE) devices such as mobile phones, connected TVs and Blu-ray players as an integrated solution.  DivX TV has been recently launched on LG Electronics Home Theater Systems and Blu-ray Disc Players. DivX has been integrated in over 300 million distributed CE devices and is a popular internet download by owners of digital content.

Base on Sonics footprint and coupled with Rovi’s software and metadata solution Rovi will be able to offer more to existing licensee, partners and reach customers. Rovi also believes that they will be able to expand their advertising distribution opportunity. Integration between RoxioNow and Rovi’s TotalGuide has already occurred as part of the TotalGuide general availability release.

Both companies welcome the move, Dave Habiger, Sonics CEO thinks they will be better place to continue to offer the digital entertainment sector a flexible, innovative and a broader range of solutions.  According to Rovi’s Fred Amoroso, president and CEO, “We believe Sonic has built an exciting portfolio that complements Rovi’s TotalGuide as well as our broad portfolio of solutions. Together, we believe the two companies will be able to address the expanding digital entertainment market with unique capabilities that will bring enhanced value to consumers.”