Public Enemy Macrovision Metamorphoses By Mark Fleischmann July 22, 2009 — To videophiles old enough to remember the 1980s, Macrovision is infamous for its videotape-based anti-copying technology. But now the company has renamed itself Rovi and is repositioning itself with a media guide designed to organize scattered content sources.

Macrovision's now obsolete anti-copying technology put blinking boxes in the vertical interval (that bar you saw when an NTSC picture rolled). This confused the luminance circuits in VCRs, preventing them from recording a watchable picture. Unfortunately it did the same to some TVs, causing the entire picture to flicker or exhibit other artifacts. Macrovision will live on in libraries of prerecorded VHS tapes, to the extent that such things still exist. The DVD version was known as RipGuard.

The company renamed Rovi is pinning its fortunes on the Rovi Liquid Media Guide. It includes a TV content guide that can be built into video devices. There's also a broadband content guide that connects to free and paid online video services, music services, social networking sites, and other internet fodder—Rovi has cut deals to bring Blockbuster OnDemand, Slacker radio, and YouTube XL (for large screens) content to the Liquid Media Guide. And there's a personal content guide to grab media stuff off your own PCs and servers.

The name Rovi is actually a subset of letters from the name Macrovision. The latter is being phased out, along with the TV Guide brand, which Macrovision acquired along with its interactive program guide.

See This Week In Consumer Electronics story and Rovi site.