Sonic Solutions in OTT Deal to Offer Roxio CinemaNow on Funai-Manufactured TV's and BD Players

Sonic Solutions, the digital media company that last year acquired the pioneering broadband VOD service, CinemaNow (it subsequently added "Roxio" to the service's name in order to make its branding consistent with its other products), announced last week that it has secured a deal with Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer, Funai Electric, to provide the Roxio CinemaNow service on multiple soon-to-be-released connected HDTV's and Blu-ray Disc players. According to the company, the deal will see the service being made available on a range of Sylvania-, Philips-, Magnavox- and Emerson-branded devices, all of which are manufactured by Funai. "We are in the midst of a major shift in consumers' home entertainment viewing behavior," Sonic president and CEO, Dave Habiger, said in a prepared statement. "Our collaboration with Funai, one of the world's leading makers of consumer electronics, will help further fuel this transition by delivering convenient, digital access to premium entertainment on a new range of affordable, high-quality digital home appliances."

According to Sonic, Roxio CinemaNow features industry-standard DRM and encoding and adaptive-delivery technologies, enabling secure, device-optimized playback of its content offerings. The company bills the service as providing a "massive selection" of content, and says that its "cloud-based media services" power devices from multiple manufacturers, including PC's, connected TV's, DVR's, Blu-ray Disc players and mobile media players. "Our relationship with Sonic is an important step we are taking to address the emerging market demand for direct access to Internet movie downloads from connected devices," Hideaki Funakoshi, general manager of Funai's DVD Division, said in a prepared statement. "We view the inclusion of Roxio CinemaNow technology powering convenient access to high-quality entertainment as an important driver for consumer adoption of our next-generation devices."

In other OTT news: Revision3--a company which bills itself as "an actual TV network for the Web," and which produces its own original, broadcast-quality programming--is set to launch a channel for Roku's $99 Roku Player Internet-to-TV device, according to a posting by Revision3 CEO, Jim Louderback, on the company's blog last week. A demo video of Revision3's new Roku channel, which Louderback says will launch "very soon now," is embedded above.