www.drmwatch.com/watermarking/article.php/3783336
By Bill Rosenblatt November 6, 2008 Auditude, a video fingerprinting startup, announced on Monday that it has struck a deal with MySpace and MTV Networks to enable contextual advertising for clips of MTV content uploaded by users to the social networking site. Auditude's technology includes ad inventory tracking as well as the ability to overlay information about the videos onto the clips themselves. MTV and MySpace will share in the resulting ad revenue. This deal resembles a similar arrangement for music that the music-oriented social networking site imeem already has in place with Warner Music Group and other music companies, using the Gracenote audio fingerprinting technology. The main difference here is that Auditude has built out a complete ad campaign management and inventory platform for online video, whereas other fingerprinting companies have not. This is an important milestone in the evolution of the fingerprinting market. To use terminology of the tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore, audio/video contextual advertising is the second "bowling pin" (niche market application) for fingerprinting. The first bowling pin, using fingerprinting to identify and block unauthorized uploads and downloads, relies on the same underlying technology but is qualitatively different from a business standpoint. This technology could bring about a profound shift in the way content is marketed online; it may even pave the way for the video industry to follow music into a model that depends more on advertising revenue and less on direct sales to consumers. The implications of this shift on content quality have yet to be determined. When we sketched this model out in a white paper back in April, we envisioned marketing executives from content companies pitching new artists, TV shows, etc., to ad executives looking to buy media that reaches certain demographics; Auditude is the first company to build out and launch this vision in its entirety. Reaction to Auditude's launch with MySpace and MTV in the blogosphere has been largely positive, unlike reactions to uses of content identification technologies used to block uploads and downloads because of suspected copyright infringement. Nevertheless, let's make no mistake about it: this is a use of a rights management technology to enable a new online content business model. It's a welcome change to see such a thing get positive publicity, for once. |
