Who knew that a technology used to assess ratings could also be used for copyright protection?
You may know that Nielsen generates the ratings that are used to determine the top-ranked shows for each week. In the olden days, Nielsen used a paper survey; as recently as February, they've been able to track a show's popularity using set-top boxes, using specially watermarked video.
Not surprisingly, Nielsen now says it can take those watermarks and apply them to Web video. But the interesting thing is that those will be applied to ratings as well as copyright protection.
The program's called Nielsen Digital Media Manager, and the technology is already used to watermark 95 percent of all U.S. TV content, according to the company. On the Web, Nielsen initially plans to use it to keep an eye on TV content distributed via the Web, measuring ratings and also using it to track down the source of pirated shows. Nielsen and its partner, Digimarc, also plan to work with the media industry to digitally watermark DVD's, movies, music, video games and other content in subsequent phases.
"Digital watermarking enables content producers to harness the power of the Internet and expand audiences for entertainment media by identifying media content wherever it goes," said Bruce Davis, chairman and CEO of Digimarc. The idea is to enable "content owners to make meaningful decisions on what content to allow or disallow on such sites," to prevent or allow things like mashups, citations, clips, et cetera. It's all a bit creepy.
As on-demand Web video rolls out, I can see why a technology like this would be needed, to track actual viewing of TV shows and determine ad rates for their creators. But I'm doubtful that they could actually generate a unique watermark and transcode it in real time to try and track down those that rip said content to their own hard drives and then re-distribute it. It's interesting how a technology that is permissible in an advertising context becomes a bit more sinister when copyright protection enters the conversation, though.
Image mashed up from Che, commons.wikimedia.org
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment