Motorola Mobility Ventures, the investment arm of Motorola Mobility Holdings, is to make a strategic investment in Catch Media, the provider of a patented licensed digital rights locker platform – Play Anywhere.

Catch Media’s patented registry, tracking, routing and clearinghouse technology, together with its post-acquisition licence, provides retailers, carriers and consumer electronics vendors the ability to offer their customers legal and convenient access to their digital content from disparate devices – smartphones, tablets, STBs, connected TVs and other connected devices inside and outside the home.

“Instant and easy access to music and video collections from any device, any place and at any time has become a necessity for consumers,” said Mony Hassid, managing director, Motorola Mobility Ventures, suggesting that Catch Media’s B2B platform gave consumers “the ubiquitous access they crave, while compensating the content owners, content distributors and every other party that contributes to the ecosystem.” Yaacov Ben-Yaacov, co-founder and CEO of Catch Media, said that Motorola Mobility’s support would enable the platform to be more tightly integrated across cellular carriers’ and Cable/Telco operators’ devices.

Catch Media’s Play Anywhere system was rolled out with Best Buy Europe in Q4 2010 through a service called ‘Music Anywhere’, offered by The Carphone Warehouse in the UK, and is expected to be rolled out in the US in early 2011 in cooperation with the music industry.  Catch Media confirmed it would continue to work closely with the content industry to offer legal media cloud services that ensure rights holders are compensated as content is consumed across disparate devices.

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