Verimatrix, located in San Diego, CA, has developed software and equipment to keep ITV a.k.a. IPTV, digital video broadcasting (DVB), cable TV, and mobile delivery from being illicitly intercepted by non-paying customers. Don’t you just love this politically correct verbiage?
It uses "forensic watermarking," that resides in the video stream itself, so that a source can be identified in case of leaks. Ohhh -- those BitTorrent kindda leaks in the broadband pipe I assume?
So what does this fancy wording hide?
According the MPAA, worldwide revenue loss for the motion picture industry was more than $18 billion in 2005. In response, a variety of techniques have been developed and are now being deployed to help address content piracy. One of these techniques is called “forensic watermarking,” an off-shoot of digital watermarking of online images, ebooks, web pages, etc.
Verimatrix claims it can securely, robustly and imperceptibly hide serialization information inside your media content. This way you are able to establish a virtual "chain of custody" for your content that accurately identifies the source of unauthorized copies, thus aiding legal actions against the source of such copies.
Unlike encryption, which creates an envelope around content that can effectively secure delivery from point to point, a watermark is embedded in the content itself and remains even after a video is decrypted, decoded and possibly re-encoded to another file.
The most robust watermarks also survive the transition from digital to analog and back. The approach of re-recording an analog playback is called the "analog hole." Robust watermarking can survive this passage through the “analog hole,” enabling identification of unauthorized copies of, for example, camcorder captured material.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t mind my camcorder footage getting mashed-up who-knows-where-and-by-whom. With so much competition, giving away a low-res duplicate of your video is a viable -- I’d say necessary -- way to stay in circulation. NO watermarking, much less “robust watermarking” for that kind of content. However, don’t forget to GET CREDIT FOR YOUR WORK, by requiring Creative Commons Attribution and link-backs from the mash-up artists’ own and syndication sites.
