Cinea Storms IBCCinea Storms IBC

Cinea extends running marks watermarking solution with perceptible ID feature

September 12, 2008

4 Min Read

RESTON, Va. -- Cinea, Inc., a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB), today announced an Enhanced Revenue Protection extension to its Running Marks™ watermarking product to combat illegal rebroadcast and/or commercial misuse of broadcast content.

System operators lose tens of millions of dollars annually to the illegal use of their broadcast content. The Running Marks Enhanced Revenue Protection extension enables the discreet display of the set-top box identifier (STB ID), known as Perceptible ID, on the video display. The new application feature enables field inspectors to quickly identify pirated signals and strengthens system operator abilities to shut down the sources of these pirated signals.

The Running Marks Enhanced Revenue Protection extension is designed to respond to the following threats:



  1. Commercial misuse: A commercial venue (such as a pub, bar, or restaurant) uses a residential subscription, rather than a commercial subscription, to access and publicly display premium sports content. The residential subscription is significantly less expensive than a commercial subscription, and as a result, system operators lose tens of millions of dollars in annual unrealized revenue.

  2. Community or Internet rebroadcast: A legitimate user captures and rebroadcasts content illegally to nonsubscribing customers, which may number in the tens to thousands. This scenario is particularly prevalent in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe and India but is a growing threat worldwide with the availability of high-speed bandwidth to transmit content via the Internet.

    The Running Marks Enhanced Revenue Protection extension illustrates a key benefit available with the Running Marks technology core asymmetric architecture. Separating the complex image-analysis step from the simple message-insertion step enabled this new functionality. In addition, the Running Marks Inserter supports both Enhanced Revenue Protection marks as well as the established forensic marks, enabling system operators to deploy one or both types of marks within their system.

    “The Running Marks Enhanced Revenue Protection extension allows system operators to directly impact their bottom line by ensuring that customers are paying what they should based on their usage,” said Rob Schumann, General Manager, Cinea. “The capabilities of the Running Marks Enhanced Revenue Protection extension meet the exacting needs of conditional access vendors and systems operators looking for advanced revenue protection tools.”

    In a separate release:

    RESTON, Va. -- Cinea, Inc., a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB); Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ: HLIT); and NDS (NASDAQ: NNDS) today announced they are developing an integrated video-on-demand (VOD) solution which harnesses Cinea’s Running Marks™ watermarking technology, Harmonic's VOD platform, and NDS’s conditional access solution VideoGuard®. This integrated-solution architecture can allow system operators to easily deploy VOD with built-in conditional access and session-based watermarking without needing to upgrade their deployed set-top boxes.

    Harmonic’s VOD solutions, which include the StreamLiner® video servers and Armada® intelligent content-distribution network software, provide operators with a complete, scalable, and flexible platform for delivery of any video service to a variety of devices.

    “We are committed to offering comprehensive, high-quality, and flexible VOD solutions to the marketplace,” said David Price, Vice President of Business Development for Harmonic. “As film release windows become shorter and the popularity of VOD continues to grow, efficiently protecting on-demand content becomes more and more critical. The combination of Cinea’s forensic watermarking capability and NDS’s conditional access solutions with Harmonic’s VOD platform offers operators a best-in-class solution to meet their needs.”

    In a separate release:

    PARIS -- Medialive, a leading digital content protection company, announced today its launch of a new SDK product range: m2mark, which features a highly secure approach to merging forensic watermarking and DRM/CAS technologies. The solution integrates Running Marks™, a forensic watermarking technology licensed from Cinea, Inc., a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB). The collaboration enables customers to benefit from these security features provided by the newly developed technologies.

    A unique element of the new m2mark system is that the watermarks are added while the content is still scrambled, so that clear content always contains the watermark. The in-depth integration of Running Marks with the Medialive technology brings an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution that reinforces the content protection from source to end-user devices.

    The Medialive digital content protection technology consists in extracting the most pertinent data (about 1%) from the original bitstream, at random positions chosen from a set of relevant locations, and replaces this data with pseudo-random dummy data, while keeping altogether the compliance according to the native format and the size of the bitstream. The newly created content is called the “self-protected content” and it can be super-distributed on any type of distribution system (web portals, P2P networks, physical media support, etc.) and can be played back by any device implementing a standard multimedia codec (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, etc.).

    “From the start we designed Running Marks for flexibility in order to work with a wide range of system architectures and designs,” said Robert Schumann, general manager of Cinea, Inc. “We are very pleased that Medialive selected Running Marks as the forensic watermarking technology to integrate with their new m2mark content security offering.”

    Cinea Inc.

Subscribe and receive the latest news from the industry.
Join 62,000+ members. Yes it's completely free.

You May Also Like