By Emmanuel Josserand, director of marketing, Civolution.

Released in 1973, Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ album sold 40 million albums and in 1982, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ sold 100 million copies. By contrast, in 2007, the number one selling album sold just 3.7 million copies. The picture is the same in the movie business, 2007 saw 1.4 billion movie theatre tickets sold worldwide (according to Media by Numbers, a box office tracking company), three times less than 1946, when 4.3 billion tickets were sold. Do these statistics indicate trouble for the music, movie theatres and television industries? Well, album sales are declining, yet listening to music is still the favorite pastime for people in their free time (46%, according to a 2008 survey from Project Phoenix), and people are listening to more music (44% of survey respondents) than they did the previous year. In fact, people listen to more music, in more places, on more devices and in addition there’s a network effect in place, with consumers creating and sharing playlists with friends. The same goes for movies. While the number of movie tickets has been going down, the sale of DVDs grew rapidly until about 2006, when the tide turned to the benefit of cable, satellite and Video On Demand (VOD) services.

Consumption via the Internet
While packed media sales diminish, consumption via the Internet is going through the roof. There are a number of reports that well over 5 billion videos have been viewed on YouTube since it launched in November 2005. This means that in just over three years, YouTube has gone from an unknown brand to becoming the third most visited website in the world, with over 13 hours of video being uploaded every minute. The lean-back television experience is also evolving. The average US home in 2007-2008 watched over 8 hours of television per day, a record since measurement started in the 1950s, according to the Nielsen Company. Equally, in the UK, the average person in 2008 was watching over 26 hours of TV every week. Television content consumption is also exploding, with new streaming Internet services and the side-loading of TV content onto portable devices meaning that our favourite TV programmes can travel with us and be consumed on a plane, train or automobile.

Content distribution
So, media consumption has ballooned over the past decade and that’s been caused by an increase in the way that content can be distributed and consumed. In this new digital world with its increased freedoms, all forms of media can co-exist and be shared and consumed on a range of devices, offering the consumer an unlimited choice of content and ways to consume that content. But an essential question remains: with all this content getting easier to obtain, save, mash-up and share; what about the rights of the content creator? And, how can media businesses best monetize and manage digital content creation and distribution? With the widespread use of the internet and the development of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, piracy has started to snowball. Regulators, industry bodies and Internet Service Providers (ISP) are now getting together to try to identify illegal downloaders. In France, the government has put forward a proposal to force ISPs to track illegal downloads and dissuade pirates by cutting their connections. In the UK, the recent ‘Digital Britain’ interim report, presented by Lord Carter, the UK Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, pledged an equally radical and legislative approach to piracy. Backing the ‘3-strikes’ approach, Carter wants to force internet service providers to crackdown on piracy by sending notices to illegal downloaders notifying them that they are breaking the law. But while this battle might have some results, the war against piracy is far from being won.

Measuring the impact
An additional issue facing content owners is measuring the impact, reach and performance of content. After all, the value of content is dictated by the number of eyeballs that see or hear it. Understanding usage and keeping control could help media content owners find ways to better monetize their assets. The digital media industry is now desperate to find ways to connect online content providers, content delivery networks (CDN), advertisers and advertising agencies, audience measurement agencies, UGC platforms and, broadcast television. More widely accepted and adopted, content identification solutions based on watermarking and fingerprinting technologies have emerged as efficient techniques which will enhance content monetization and have an important role to play in protecting content. Technology is at the heart of the digital revolution, but it is also at the centre of many of its problems and it’s looking increasingly certain that the antidote will have a technological base. Over the past decade a number of technologies have surfaced trying to solve these issues and help in developing new business models for digital media.

Digital watermarking
Digital watermarking is a process in which specific data is included within multimedia content, providing its own unique identity. The watermarking process is based on the addition of slight modifications to the video signal using specialized software. As the modifications are slight in terms of payload and are continuously adapted to the content, the watermark is indiscernible and can only be detected and decoded using specialized hardware or software. Watermarks are imperceptible to the human eye and it is virtually impossible to detect the presence of the watermark without proprietary decoding equipment. Any attempt to destroy or remove the watermark will seriously impair the quality of the material in which it is embedded. Digital watermarking enables the identification, management and tracking of digital images. It can be used for a variety of different applications, including broadcast verification, digital rights management, image copyright protection, forensic tracking and mobile commerce. Inserted watermarks can be used for several purposes, including identifying the content itself, identifying the party receiving the content, or triggering an action such as linking to other information.

Digital Fingerprinting
Digital fingerprinting is a technique in which sophisticated software identifies, extracts and then compresses characteristic components of a media, enabling that content to be immediately and uniquely identified by its resultant ‘fingerprint’. A fingerprint is a set of features which uniquely identifies a segment of media content. Video fingerprinting is commonly carried out by extracting several unique features of digital video content that can be stored in the form of a fingerprint. The evaluation and identification of video content is then performed by comparing the characteristic features of the extracted video fingerprints (see Figure 2 below). For digital video data, both audio and video fingerprints can be extracted, each having individual significance for different application areas. The creation of a video fingerprint involves the use of specialized software that decodes the video data and then applies several feature extraction algorithms. Video fingerprints are highly compressed when compared to the original source file and can therefore be easily stored in databases for later comparison. It’s important to note that there is too little data for the fingerprints alone to be used to reconstruct the original video content.

Piracy Deterrence
Watermarking and fingerprinting solutions have become increasingly widespread throughout the media industries either working alongside or as an alternative to DRM (Digital Right Management) to provide both security and business monetization opportunities. There is a fundamental difference between DRM and identification technologies. DRM installs a number of locks within content or devices to restrict content usage as required by the content owner (or distributor). Identification technologies on the other hand, do not restrict usage of content, unless specifically requested, but enable identification of original content, alert a content owner of its usage and even provide triggers for further actions, including monetization opportunities. Allowing consumption of content without restricting its usage, but placing a specific identifier within content and allowing content to be tracked, can be a disincentive to content piracy. In fact, a recent study conducted by Interpret for the Digital Watermarking Alliance showed that when exposed to the concept of Digital Serial Number technology, downloaders say they would be less likely to download content illegally and more likely to pay for legal content. Thirty three per cent of downloaders say that they would ‘definitely not’ or ‘probably not’ download content using P2P services if a serial number could highlight the improper access to content.

Transactional Watermarking
Transactional watermarking has been recently developed as a further deterrent to piracy. This new technique (see figure 3 below) allows unique watermarks to be inserted instantaneously at the moment of download (and faster than real-time), making that specific content unique to the individual user. If the file is later found in an unauthorized place, it can be traced back to that specific user.

Contextual Advertising
The ability to target a specific audience by its content affinity has had tremendous success over the last 4-5 years. Google Adsense contextual advertising technology is the best example. Based on keyword indexing, Google offers ad placement according to a search, even if the content of the site itself does not reference the keyword itself.By extension, this could be applied to ads within video or music tracks. For instance, an e-retailer could provide an application that detects the content a user has selected and insert targeted ads such as coupons, discounts, etc. This is an avenue through which content could potentially become free to users and only paid for by targeted advertising.

Content Measurement
The amount of video content flowing through a growing number of delivery platforms is escalating at such a pace that it has radically transformed the way sport, news, advertising, programme and film content is consumed and the business models that support this distribution. On one hand, content is being delivered to a much wider pool of viewers globally, which increases its value. On the other hand, however, the variety of delivery platforms diminishes audience numbers for each distribution method. Add to this phenomenon of the rapid increase in user generated content and the availability to watch almost any content minutes after it is aired, and you see a media landscape in unprecedented flux. Content identification technologies have an important role to play by enabling media executives to precisely understand when, where and how their content has been aired. By understanding usage, content owners can evaluate, manage, adapt and respond to tracking information and improve their offerings and business models. Broadcast monitoring, for instance, offers critical intelligence to content owners, allowing them to evaluate the reach and performance of video assets, control content inventory, check for contract compliance, evaluate and report on sponsorship return-on-investment.

Entertainment
Figure 4 (below) shows how an entertainment can benefit from broadcast monitoring to maximize return-on-investment. The web 2.0 applications allow users to create and share content in simple steps. The explosive growth in the popularity of these applications has created a new content distribution and consumption paradigm. These new ‘channels’ of distribution have the potential to create substantial new revenue streams from advertising. Often, however, the files generating the highest interest contain copyrighted content. Content owners demand their share of this new advertising medium or urge UGC platforms to block unauthorized usage or distribution of their content. With new technologies available, both content owners and media distributors are working together to develop new business models in order to monetize their content and create legal, sustainable businesses. Using fingerprinting combined with metadata associated with pre-determined specific business rules (see figure 5 below), the technology is now available to enable content or rights owners to block media content at the time of upload, re-direct a viewer to a designated site or even insert an ad or promotional coupon related to that content.

Widespread adoption
Content identification technologies continue to proliferate and are getting more widely adopted as a way to protect content and provide solutions enabling new business models. As the technology evolves, further applications will develop, allowing all content producers to safeguard and monetize content. After all, content is made to be consumed, not locked. With an increase in the simplicity of digital distribution, eroding individual audience numbers and increased competition in both media creation and distribution, it’s more important than ever that cost-effective and scalable techniques to identify and monetize content usage are available to enable the media sector to continue to prosper.

Figure 1: Digital watermarking process.

Figure 2: Characteristic features of a video.

Figure 3: Transactional watermarking process.

Figure 4: Broadcast monitoring return-on-investment.

Figure 5: Fingerprinting monetization applications.