(15 April 2008 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Adoption of digital watermarking by media companies and technology providers to manage and secure digital content across many new forms of distribution is increasing, while more and more media content contains the feature, according to the Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA).

The DWA is an international group of companies involved in commercialising digital watermarking solutions.

Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognised by special software detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast - without affecting the quality of the content.

Recent industry developments and news demonstrating continued momentum for digital watermarking solutions include:

- A MultiMedia Intelligence study identified digital watermarking and fingerprinting as a key growth market that could surpass $500 million by 2012. MultiMedia Intelligence president Mark Kirstein says, "Applications leveraging digital watermarking are expanding, as the technology moves into multiple key roles.

"Media owners and advertisers are seeking more visibility and metrics on usage and distribution, or wish to monetize and control the content as it is distributed via the Internet, peer-to-peer, and social networks. There are many new
offerings in the market that rely on digital watermarking to make this possible.

"Likewise, companies are positioning digital watermarking for integration into set-top boxes to support early release of HD programming, and others are incorporating watermarking in next-generation Blu-ray devices."

- The DWA will be represented at the Digital Hollywood Spring conference on 8 May, 2008, on the "Next-Generation P2P and Film" panel.

- Cinea, a Dolby company, has signed two new technology partners for its digital watermarking solutions. SecureMedia is incorporating Cinea's technology into its IPTV content security offering to enable content owners and system operators to track content origin and distribution information right down to the specific transaction or device. Cinea has also
announced that Broadcom a, semiconductor manufacturer is integrating Cinea's Running Marks solution into Broadcom's system-on-chip (SoC) decoder platform.

The resulting technology will be made available to all Broadcom customers with a Cinea Running Marks licence, including set-top box vendors, conditional access vendors, and cable, telecommunications, and satellite system operators.

Philips is integrating digital watermarking into its line of hospitality television sets and will soon support a full range of HDTV sizes. Hoteliers have long enjoyed an early-release movie window that allows them to entertain their guests with box-office hits prior to release on DVD. The Philips VTrack digital watermarking solution is designed to ease concerns about piracy that have led certain content owners to withhold high-definition media from this advance window. In addition, Philips has announced that five Hollywood movie studios have approved of Philips' CineFence forensic marking of digital cinema soundtracks to deter piracy.

- Teletrax has signed contracts with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Atlas Agency, the largest news and distribution agency in Spain, and Agence France-Presse, the leading global news agency, to electronically monitor usage of their news content. The company also added three new direct response advertising clients to its roster, including G2 Direct & Digital, Kent Creative Group and Gold Mountain Media. All will use the Teletrax suite of broadcast intelligence services to monitor and track broadcast, cable and satellite television airings of their direct response advertisements.

In addition, US independent measurable media company America, has signed a four-year contract renewal with Teletrax to electronically monitor and track airings of it long and short form direct response television advertisements.

- Thomson recently announced that Moovyplay has selected NexGuard Thomson's content security solution suite, for implementation into its portable movie rental service. Moovyplay is a venture developed by Paris-based CPFK, France's leader in DVD rental services with 2,200 outlets under three retailer brands: Video Futur, Cinebank and Video Pilote. The partnership marks the first integration of a digital video watermarking solution into a portable video device.

NexGuard will be embedded into customised handheld devices created both by Moovyplay and Archos, which will allow customers to conveniently rent movies by loading dozens of titles at one time from an in-store kiosk onto their device.