The announcement that Oxford Media, Inc., the Irvine, CA-based digital entertainment, communications and technology company, has signed a letter of intent with Innovative Media Solutions (IMS Inflight & IMS Consultants) for the acquisition of IMS seems to us to portend the potential of the merged entities to create a Content Management juggernaut in the IFE space and we think this marriage might be even better that their last romance with Wencor.

Oxford Medias initial line of business is the delivery of Pay-Per-View (PPV) Video-on-Demand (VOD) entertainment content to small and mid-size hotels and motels. But Oxfords CEO, Lew Jaffe, acknowledges that the acquisition of IMS fits perfectly into our vision of building a uniquely capable media company with emphasis on delivering content to a wide range of captive audiences, including consumers in hotels and airplanes using multiple wireless modalities including WiMAX.

This is an intriguing statement when you consider that IMS is currently capable of delivering fully-encoded, fully-integrated, fully-encrypted IFE content by removable media, WiFi, Internet/VPN, CDMA and GSM using its embedded content/data loader, The Terminal Data Loader (TDL), and DigitalPrizzm network. Remember that IMS network is bi-directionalit offloads usage/system performance/bit-byte data as well as loads content to the onboard server. Oxford delivers the same kind of early window content to hotels via a secure satellite delivery network, and also captures/manages usage data. Consider the implications of integrating the two Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and adding the emerging WiMAX capabilitiesmerging satellite, VPN and multiple wireless technologies with all of the current capabilities.

The WiMAX component is especially intriguinghere is a fast-emerging, wide-area wireless broadband technology that provides a powerful last mile solution for high-speed access (think airports here). WiMAX can reach as far as ten milescertainly far enough to cover the perimeter of an airport. IMS has proven itself capable of creating a secure content delivery infrastructure that has gained content support from all the major studios and content providers for IFE, just as Oxford Media has done in the hospitality market. Both companies provide their customers with turnkey content solutions, including content acquisition, licensing, aggregation, encoding, integration, and key management services.

Consider this as well, the cost-savings of delivering content to multiple markets from a single data center has economies of scale. A single entity that can select, license and fully prepare and deliver content in a secure, cost-effective way, and capture and manage all the attendant usage data has a definite advantages over the competition. Does this sound like the future of Content Management in IFE, or what?