An end to DIVX, not DivX
DIVX — not to be confused with DivX — was Circuit City’s proprietary pay-per-view DVD playback system. The developers of DIVX started a company called Cinea that was later acquired by Dolby Labs. The DIVX technology was applied to a product called S-View, which was sold to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in an effort to reduce video piracy, especially the screener copies of movies nominated for Academy Awards that hadn’t yet been released on home video.
S-View discs required a custom player that was connected, as were DIVX players, to a central server for verification prior to playback. Regular DVDs also worked on the players, which were sent for free to Academy members who vote on the Oscars™. The hardware was made by KiSS Technology of Denmark, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems.
So far, so good, but it was up to each movie studio to decide whether or not to use the special DVDs. After a promising start, resistance to Cinea grew within the industry, as explained in this article, and only a few studios joined the program. Eventually S-View was dropped, and Cinea concentrated on other digital security projects.
Without any announcement or notice from Dolby that I can find, Cinea as an entity is apparently now gone. If you go to Cinea’s address you’re directed to the Dolby Labs home page. And with the end of Cinea I assume we have seen the last of what began as DIVX.
Add comment October 30th, 2008