In an unexpected move that may make sense Macrovision a technology company known for its work in Movie and Video Game Copy Protection has announced it will purchase Gemstar the company best known for its TV Listings magazine TvGuide and it’s on-screen guides used by many television distribution networks.

The 2.8 Billion Dollar price tag is said by Alfred J. Amoroso, Macrovision’s chief executive … “It’s going to create an opportunity to have a completely new consumer experience about how they’re going to manage entertainment in the home,”.

Well we can only hope he is right but what this will mean for the daily operations and publication of TVGuide is left to be seen.

In addition we can’t forget that Microsoft tried the same thing with its purchase of WebTv. Although that technology has had some inroads in the non-techsavi households for the most part WebTv has been a huge flop.

Microsoft’s own Media Center PCs have seen little interest by most customers and some of its technology has been scrapped or merged into Microsoft’s other operating systems.

Media and Distribution of products will soon see a potential change as drastic as the introduction of the Color TV but who will bring it to us and will it be over regular chanels or across the internet is still to be seen.

However if Nielsen Ratings are any clue YouTube viewers already have seen single videos of Talking Cats that get 2 to 4 million views a day while some tv networks like CBS’s TheCW have full production shows that only reach that many (2.5 million viewers a show) or less.

For now this just seems like a side step bailout of a company that has been losing readers since the mid 1980’s.

As a Note if you are interested in this industry you should keep your eyes on Zap2it.com since they are one of the leaders in distribution of Television Programming Schedules for Internet Customers.