Macrovision, the long-standing provider of copy protection for home video entertainment, will be jumping straight into Blu-ray Disc following its acquisition of SPDC (Self-Protecting Digital Content) protection technologies from Cryptography Research, Inc. In a deal worth about $45 million USD in cash plus warrants for stock, Macrovision will own the patents, technologies and agreements of BD+, a small virtual machine technology embedded inside Blu-ray Disc hardware for the purpose of digital rights management. BD+ technology allows content providers to include executables on Blu-ray Discs to perform specific, content protecting functions against piracy. For example, the BD+ virtual machine could run diagnostics on the host environment to see if the disc player has been modified, or to verify that the media keys have not been changed. The BD+ protection technology is cited as a reason for Hollywood studios such as Fox and Disney to side exclusively with Blu-ray Disc over HD DVD.