Philips Electronics scored another win in its Philips Content Identification
division, which develops watermarking and related technologies. Its new
video watermarking offering, CineFence, has been designed to meet standards for
digital cinema (DCI, or Digital Cinema Initiatives, a consortium of Hollywood
studios) that were defined last July. With the technology, which was
announced on Tuesday, copies of pirated films made via illicit feeds from
digital cinema projectors can be traced back to the theater in which it was
shown and the date and time. CineFence is designed to survive downsampling
to compressed formats such as MPEG-4 and DivX, though it is not particularly
designed to work with video taken by camcorders in theaters.
Access Interactive Technologies (AccessIT), a digital cinema technology
company, will be incorporating CineFence into its Christie/AIX digital cinema
equipment for movie theaters, which AccessIT expects to roll out to several
thousand US theaters (including 2300 to the Carmike chain) starting this year.
Philips Content Identification is emerging as a leader in the watermarking
space; it is also gaining traction for its acoustic fingerprinting technology
through its use in the
Snocap digital
music distribution platform. Forensic watermarking is making slow but
steady progress for digital video, though it looks most likely to succeed in
"analog hole" applications. Some vendors (like Israel-based Dynamic Media
Systems and US-based USA Video Interactive as well as Philips's own
RepliTrack
technology) are positioning watermarking as a better solution for DVDs, compared
to the weak CSS encryption technology that they currently use, whereas others
are looking beyond DVDs.
The studios, meanwhile, are pushing watermarking most aggressively as part of
the so-called Analog
Hole bill; the technology enshrined in that legislation is different from
that of Philips. Next-generation optical media technologies will contain
stronger encryption that conforms to the AACS standard.
Events
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
