The Cinea division of Dolby Laboratories has announced a couple of important
"design wins" for its Running Marks watermarking technology, as part of its
strategy to penetrate the set-top box (STB) market. STMicroelectronics has
integrated Running
Marks into its STi7109 decoder platform for HDTV STBs, and NDS has
licensed Cinea's
technology for integration into its market-leading conditional access products.
Cinea made both announcements as a prelude to next week's IBC trade show in
Amsterdam.
Cinea's successes reflect increased interest in watermarking for IPTV and
other digital television distribution channels. Its principal technology
partner in this market is
Widevine, whose encryption technology integrates with Cinea's. The
companies' main competitor, at least in the US market, is
Verimatrix,
which offers both encryption and watermarking in a single package. (Verimatrix
and Widevine are currently embroiled in
patent
litigation as well.)
Cinea's primary advantage in the watermarking space is that it is able to do
transactional watermarking, also known as media serialization, with no
requirement for additional processor power on the STB (or other client device).
This type of watermarking technique embeds a unique identifier in each piece of
downloaded or streamed content, so that forensic watermark detection can
determine not just the source of the content but also what device obtained it
from a server.
Although transactional watermarking is much more effective than simply
embedding the same identifier in every instance of a given piece of content, it
has typically required incremental hardware on the client device to compute and
insert the unique watermarks. Running Marks virtually eliminates this
requirement, resulting in lower cost to include watermarking in client devices.
Lower costs are likely to lead to broader adoption among makers of STBs and
other video clients.
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