Corel Corp. announced Tuesday that it has completed the acquisition of Roxio from Rovi. The two companies initially announced the transition in January. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Roxio is a maker of media conversion software for Mac OS X and Windows. The company’s portfolio includes the popular Toast software, which enables Mac users to burn audio and video CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.
Shawn Cadeau, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing at Corel, offered reassuring words for Roxio customers concerned about the transition. He said that Roxio’s products are “an important addition.”
“We look forward to bringing together the best of what Corel and Roxio have to offer as we work to deliver even richer, more rewarding experiences to our customers,” said Cadeau.
I had no idea either companies still existed. Who burns to physical media anymore? Oh yeah, probably the same people who use Corel.
Darn. I was looking forward to some Sonic Solutions audio CD mastering tech trickling down into Toast, to replace the awful, fiddly UI that they whipped up to integrate Jam.
I think you would be surprised how many CD/DVD burns still occur. While many of us tech savvy folks have moved to cloud-based file sharing, there are plenty of people who haven’t – and many companies who can’t.
For example, state & federal laws prohibit health insurance companies from using cloud-based file sharing due to privacy and security issues. You have to provide files to them in a way that they remain in control of it – such as email attachments and physical disc media.
Then there are the millions upon millions of people who have a plain old TV and DVD player. No WiFi, etc…
Also, Toast doesn’t just do disc burning. I use it regularly for video conversion, for example. The TiVo transfer software included with Toast is great – I just dumped 11 hours of video on my TiVo that I want to keep but don’t want to watch right now and converted it to a format I can stream to the Apple TV later, for example.