USVO is at the center of the universe- ok the world maybe.….

Posted by patrick on June 19, 2009 at 3:06 pm

Yesterday presented another set of circumstances that suggest, if you will indulge us for the moment, that USVO is part and parcel of what is happening in the world.

You might not have noticed that The US Open began play at Bethpage in New York. Rain shortened the day, and a bunch of unknowns led. Two members of the USVO team hit the links yesterday as well, playing in a relatively unknown charity tourney for the Providence St. Joseph Burbank Hospital Foundation. The event is so unknown that the hospital has no mention of it on its website even though the event raised over $300,000 in a day. Providence is the home of the Roy & Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center, and the Disney company features prominently in the production of the tournament. Operational staff from Disney, Universal and Warner Bros studios- the half of the big six studios based in the valley that also houses the two hospitals that are the beneficiaries, populate the organizing committees and many of the foursomes.
It was a great place to enjoy the sunshine, compete in a friendly match of skills ( or lack thereof) and gauge the thinking of some of the business middle management.

What can be reported is that people are interested in new ideas, especially about increasing sales. Getting new ideas in front of this crowd costs money, and then once they are on board, requires the ability to execute on those ideas. While USVO wasn’t in a position to use the golf event to push our agenda, the good news is that our competitors weren’t even there, much less sponsoring a hole, or a prize. We were the ones taking the opportunity to shift people’s focus from their hooks and slices to their digital delivery strategy and concerns.

Another item you might not have noticed yesterday, while you are doing what constitutes your daily business, was the announcement of a court verdict of $1.92 million against a single mother of four in Minneapolis for downloading 24 songs. The RIAA, which spearheaded the suit, has provided a great demonstration of what we here as USVO have been stating about the issue. In winning the suit, the RIAA has created a lose/lose result.
Headlines abound , and analysis make it clear that in winning, the record industry has cemented it’s reputation as the least sensible sector of the digital economy. While the RIAA spokespeople express satisfaction with the verdict, the revenues of the members’ music units continue to slide.

The absurdity of prosecuting a single mother of four for downloading, while ignoring those that actually facilitate and exploit that activity for material gain seems to be lost on the RIAA. While it has promised to not sue any individuals, thousands of individuals have received the lawsuits that are the method of message delivery to the public that while listening to music for free on the radio is ok, copying that music and sharing it with others isn’t.

It also brings out those who wish to challenge the constitutionality of the suit and award.

While out on the course, we discussed these and other important issues. The world is in need, dire need, of a proactive and credible way for rights holders to brave the digital distribution world. USVO is in need of the means to deliver it. That’s what we are working on everyday.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

Good and bad in Wolverine theft and opening….

Posted by Tariq Khan on May 13, 2009 at 11:22 am

Events of the last week prevented my posting a more timely comment upon what has become the most visible violation of copyright in some time- the online availability of the Fox film “Wolverine”. As CNN noted in their article “In digital age, can movie piracy be stopped?” this is an especially troubling example for a business further challenged by the stalled economy and ownership more than ever concerned with the bottom line.

It is also troubling to a leadership which recognizes that the motion picture industry generates the single largest positive contribution to the nation’s balance of trade, as was discussed in a Congressional Judicial Committee hearing earlier this year. “”During our hearing in Los Angeles, director Steven Soderbergh said that in 2007, the entertainment industry generated a trade surplus of $13.6 billion,” committee chair US Congressman Howard Berman added. “Imagine what those numbers would be if we could rein in piracy.”

As any follower of USVO already knows the answer to CNN’s question about stopping piracy. First of all, it’s the wrong question. As noted in an earlier CNN article, a more immediate and relevant query is what is the harm to the film’s release? “Whether the leaked video will eventually hurt the film’s box office earnings “is very difficult to discern,” according to CNN’s source.”

“Wolverine” opened with $85.1 million in box office, first among movies that weekend. It ranked first every day since opening until “Star Trek” opened this last weekend and now has over $200million in global receipts. Did more or less X-men fans go to theaters based upon what they heard or saw of the ‘incomplete” version? Can #1 ranked $85million plus weekend be considered a damaged result?

The motion picture industry can’t tell, and would have a hard time pleading its case as it has enjoyed, especially in these times, a good year so far. And ultimately that is the question that both the industry and policy leaders need to examine- how to generate more business. Piracy existed before today’s BitTorrent, or ubiquitous processing and connections made it available to all. And the industry always found ways to be profitable regardless. It isn’t that piracy isn’t important, costly in many ways or full of individual and corporate ethical concerns. For the industry it is that the threat of digital piracy has stopped the world’s content distribution leaders from using innovative technology to engage and profit in new markets and channels to reach customers.

The good news for USVO is the mention of forensic watermarking in a number of places including the CNN initial report. In a Wired report, watermarking is mentioned as the reason Fox has confidence in catching the person who put their product outside the licensed system. USVO is cited as Fox’s vendor. Currently USVO’s product is used by the Home Entertainment unit for business to business marketing of finished product.

Overall, the expanded visibility of piracy, and its many impacts on a leading US industry sector, is good news for USVO. We find our enforcement and exploration of new business message resonating with policy leaders. We continue to field queries from business unit managers in the content distribution industry. We continue to seek the partners that will enable us to answer those queries with new business.

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Pirates convicted!

Posted by patrick on April 17, 2009 at 2:04 pm

Although Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, asserts that copyright infringers will have to give up the word to those modern seafaring criminals off the Horn of Africa, today’s news can still assert that copyright Pirates have been convicted. Four people associated with the site The Pirate Bay, were found guilty as announced today in Swedish courts.
The trial was considered of sufficient importance that Swedish television broadcast the entire proceeding online, a first.
While the defendants were sentenced to one year of jail and over $3.6million in fines, they are expected to appeal the verdict.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

Hollywood mulls its good fortune

Posted by on March 6, 2009 at 10:13 pm

As mentioned in previous posts, the motion picture industry does well during drops in the larger economy. This winter has confirmed this pattern. In this article in Daily Variety, it wonders why.
While this is good immediately, the season’s good performance meant losing domestic incentives for production and investment in the stimulus package, and is no doubt welcomed by enterprise pirates.

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No time like crisis time

Posted by patrick on March 3, 2009 at 2:05 pm

The pressures on the existing content companies are showing up in multiple ways as the continuing credit crisis and resulting recession in economic activity impacts grow.
But for content companies, which have traditionally done well during lean times, this cycle promises to force the issues that confronted them during the boom years.

Theory meets reality in two items in the last week. First is the budget squeeze. With recession a reevaluation of all expenditures are in order. At the studios, TV series production budgets, already under intense scrutiny, have been dropped across the board- 2- 20% according to The Hollywood Reporter. At the MPAA, the studios lobbying and unified agency for all manner of things, not the least of which is reminding the world of how much money piracy costs them, the budget for the upcoming year is expected to be cut by about $20 million. Since about half of the MPAA’s $100 million was expended in areas related to piracy, it is to be expected that the studios will have even more pressure on them to innovate their way through the digital distribution jungle while the existing strategies of lobbying for extended copyright, legislation of college networks and the cat and mouse of hunting enterprise pirates will be curtailed.

The other area is highlighted by well read blogger and Linux Journal senior editor Doc Searls complaints about his options as a TV subscriber to Verizon’s FIOS service in Boston MA. Like many of us, Doc is unhappy having to pay for all those channels he doesn’t watch. And while HD over the air is pretty well supported in his neck of the woods, those same shows are coming to him via the internet. So his call for ‘ala cart’ television is neither unique nor likely to shrink under economic duress. This week Doc dropped his TV service from Verizon.

For both Verizon, and the studios, such calls mean further erosion of steady and predictable cash flows, more complicated development and distribution processes.

Naturally, we think digital watermarking, and SmartMarks in particular, are part of the answer to both of these circumstances. If Doc could buy just the shows he wants with a personalized watermark that could be used to hold him accountable for using the content outside of his acquired rights, the risks to the producers of his favorite shows could be mitigated while new revenue streams develop. For the MPAA, which conducts much of the sleuthing for the studios, going public with catching crooks is an opportunity to let the content consuming public know that it is thieves that concern the content owners, not viewers, while trumpeting they are defending the rights of content owners.

We bang this drum here a lot, but it bears repeating. Watermarks are a smart and elegant solution to much of what ails and challenges the content industry. We have proven that this technology is adaptable, effective, and can be cost efficiently used and installed in the studio environment. We are eager to expand our demonstrations, and need our audience to support this effort, in the public discourse, and in the marketplace of both content and equity.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

All the news that fits

Posted by patrick on February 6, 2009 at 2:28 pm

Over the past year, a few of you have written comments asking for information that speaks to USVO’s strategy and financial position. This is not the appropriate venue for that information for a number of reasons. Those questions should be directed to corporate leadership. As a publicly traded company, USVO must adhere to rules about ‘news’ and the use of the blog page has not been deemed as the channel for this type of news.
We appreciate your interest in USVO and the issues discussed here, which are the core technical, business and social issues surrounding digital content distribution and security.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

Losing the News battle

Posted by patrick on February 6, 2009 at 1:40 pm

Wednesday the New York Times printed on its front page an article with “Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios” as the headline. It’s first bit of evidence to support that idea was that Warner Brothers had ‘failed miserably” in its attempts to keep track of every physical copy of the film. Yet “By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world”
The article goes on to suggest that “Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment”, as if 1) Napster was the cause of the music business’s woes or 2) Hollywood is suffering anything like the music business.
The evidence otherwise is right at the top of the nation’s agenda, as Hollywood had it’s tax break in the stimulus bill removed based upon the simple fact that Hollywood had a great January.
In fact when one examines the “The Dark Knight” ( I can’t share with you the IMDB Pro page where one finds this data) the $185 million production has grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide as of today. Hardly a failure, and certainly nothing to cry about.
At the same time, if even a fraction of those seven million estimated illegal downloads could have been converted into transactions, the success would be that much greater.
The MPAA, source of the often quoted figure of $18 billion annual losses to the industry, had its voice in the article. John Malcolm, the association’s director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said “There are a lot of very technologically sophisticated people out there who are very good at this and very good at hiding. We have limited resources to bring to the fight.”
This last statement begs the question, not asked by the writers, of just what Hollywood’s budget is. Also missing is any discussion of alternatives. Fortunately the readers of the NY Times have supplied this in their comments.
Some of the highlights include our favorite- “one way to protect streamed content is with a digital watermark.”
We have written extensively here in the past about why and how watermarking is a solution not just to piracy but capturing new business for Hollywood. And we have written about what we think is required. Unfortunately, we are not yet operating at a level where we can take those lines of thinking to the forums where the Hollywood is listening.
We need your help. We need your voices to chip in and saturate those writers with encouragement to follow these ideas instead of accept studio sourced quotes, and old interpretations. Write them at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/brian_stelter/index.html?inline=nyt-per and http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/brad_stone/index.html?inline=nyt-per

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

Late holiday gift from Apple

Posted by patrick on January 13, 2009 at 1:58 pm

Happy New Year to all of you. Here on this page, we have been discussing content distribution and protection issues for two years, beginning in January of 2007. Our core story has been that there is a tremendous business opportunity for content owners in digital distribution, and that watermarking is the enabling technology, and that SmartMarks, USVO’s watermarking technology, is a great choice in watermarking.

Most of the news so far this year is very negative, but there have been some bright spots. Chief among them was Apple’s announcement that it was dropping DRM from its iTunes store. Nearly two years after Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the world on his “thoughts on music” in which he criticized DRM, the company has worked out agreements to eliminate it from the world’s single largest music store. It is important to note that the very companies that it took this long for Apple to work out DRM free licenses with, had already allowed DRM free sales at Amazon.com and Play.com among others, for over a year.

One doesn’t have to dig too deeply to see a number of agendas and issues being played out here, but for those looking forward to, and investing their efforts in a world free of transaction blocking, customer hating, inhibiting prevention oriented applications and thinking, this is a landmark. One challenge in the watermarking space is to distinguish it from DRM, so let me state once again that SmartMarks are not DRM, but rather an enforcement approach to content security.

As stated in these pages time and again, the key to leveraging digital technology for content distribution is trust. All of us prefer to deal with entities we know and trust, and for as long as the motion picture industry has existed, it has not trusted new technology or its customers with that technology. As a result, it has not benefited from the power and cost effectiveness available there.

Instead suspicion has been the dominant thinking. If theft was possible, it was probable, even though the vast majority of computer enabled customers just wanted the content as conveniently as possible. Until iTunes was rolled out, that convenience was supplied by various pirate services. Because of its success, iTunes has become the flagship of a slowly modernizing music industry. So the dumping of DRM from that ship is clearly worth the headlines and analysis given it.

A great summary of web reactions was published at Billboard magazine, the trade paper of the music industry. Opinion varies, but in all cases the impact is considered significant. At the Boston Globe, the judgment is right in the headline, “Apple’s iTunes changes may show digital rights management’s a loser”

The chip heads have dug in and have investigated the details of the execution as well, and pronounced their own judgments. This too bodes well for watermarking, because while the songs are now DRM free, they are not without some security. Turns out that Apple is making each download traceable to the email address registered to the iTunes application that downloads the song, whether that is on a computer or the latest channel for delivery, the Apple 3G iPhone. While a savvy user can be expected to work around this, as they have much of the restrictive aspects of iTunes, the model for enforcement strategy is in place at the world’s largest music retailer.

While it is nearly a decade that the motion picture folk have been saying that they aren’t going to do what the music people did, and have done just what the music industry had done, there are still those saying that DRM free video downloads won’t ‘ever’ happen. But the cognoscenti are already calling for DRM free video. Driving this demand is the need for new sales- “But until the day consumers can buy content once and move it to any device they want, the market for purchasing video content won’t see the kind of growth that many of us in the industry have been waiting for.”

And this is the big promise of the decision. For the first time, in a well established marketplace, vendors can watch how DRM free content sells. This is the beginning of the DRM free era in content. We should expect more theft, a number of new schemes for cost avoidance and more. But key will be how much new business Apple can do now that one of the restrictive aspects of the iTunes/iPod/Apple silo has been deleted.

Welcome back, and expect to see more comments in the days ahead as the pressure on content distribution companies create new opportunities, especially for strategies that are targeted on new sales.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

You can’t stop this train

Posted by patrick on October 3, 2008 at 4:03 pm

The USVO team has been engaged in a summer long effort to expand capacity of the company to fulfill the demand that has resulted from our successful installation at Fox.

That means that I haven’t been keeping you appraised of all the developments in the wider world of copyright, digital distribution, and piracy that our products are directly a part of. My apologies.

And this week has so many pieces of news that it is a good time to review-

First and foremost is the challenge to traditional content distributors that digital technology presents and how they have been responding. Once again this week we see the studios resorting to the lawsuit in challenging RealNetworks latest product which makes it easier for consumers to use their computer to make a copy of a DVD.

Without getting too deeply into the details of the technology, and how it will be interpreted in courts, copyright law allows you to make copies of the content you have licensed for your personal use. The studios see this application as encouragement to copy rental DVDs instead of buying them. Which it may be. We don’t really know.

What we do know is that this sequence of events is fear based by the studios. Much as Luddites sought to destroy the mills and spinning machines that brought hardship upon the hand spinning and weavers of pre industrial England, today every technological development generates new winners and makes losers out of some previously existing business. The issue is usually one of adaptation, as history shows that those who attempt to stop progress get run over.

Now the studios are not Luddites. Also in the news this week is their agreement to finance the conversion of theaters to digital presentation equipment. The effort to convert theatrical presentation from prints shipped in cans to files sent over wires is almost a decade old. One of the many sticking points has always been over who should pay, as while the distributors have always acknowledged that they will save nearly a billion a year on print and shipping costs, paying to upgrade some one else’s business has been a hard sell. Especially since digital projection and connection will make it easier for the theater owners to sell other content than movies.

The business proposition for the studios is now clear. In order to revive theatrical attendance and thus grosses in what is considered the ‘flagship’ market window, the studios have committed to 3D production and distribution. There have been demonstrations in the market that the customers will not only come out to see a 3D film, but pay more for it. But to have a broad release, a 3D film needs more than the less than 900 digital screens currently in the USA. So long-term financing of another 20,000 digital screens now makes sense to the decision makers atop the majors.

Other new propositions are on the horizon too. The studios are searching for a way to have a home cinema window, delivering a high definition screening to all those high end home theaters that have been installed in the last four years. Somewhere between being in your local cinema, and on the shelves of your local Blockbuster, they will sell you a premium screening of their recent release. They have even started a standards committee to explore how to do this with their 3D films.

So when the business opportunity is clear, the high and mighty are willing to change their way of doing business and even invest in their partners’ infrastructure. And this is why we are excited about MediaEscort and SmartMarks. Experience has shown that prevention of theft is a failure. Prohibitions always fail. But enforcement has secured not just banks but the social contract. Order in our streets prevails because we understand that there are consequences to not following the rules. And in enforcement (watermarking) the studios will find confidence to embrace the digital world.

There are lots of issues to sort out. Note the decision announced yesterday that royalty payments for digital song sales will not be increased. On the one hand music publishers have a very good argument that file delivery is much less costly than physical, so their percentage of gross sales should be raised. Apple on the other hand has a pretty good position about margins already being thin for the proprietors of the iTunes store- now the largest seller of retail music in the US.

This is a fast moving, but long story. Expect news constantly. Meanwhile, we are putting our heads back down to concentrate on our branch- which is about making lightweight, robust and economically viable watermarking available to the world’s largest mnedia distribution companies for the world’s most valuable content.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

Olympic marks

Posted by patrick on July 1, 2008 at 8:17 pm

While USVO has targeted its SmartMarks technology at high value transactional marking, there are other uses for watermarks.

As reported by AP and commented upon by Michael Learmonth of Silicon Alley Insider,

NBC has taken an aggressive approach to making the Olympics available online, putting over 2200 hours of coverage online. Compare that with the 1400 hours available on the six NBC owned broadcast and cable channels.

In order to steer audiences to its highest revenue channels, NBC is strategically selecting the events and sports that it thinks will generate the largest audiences, and it is banning the use of any Olympic video online by other news organizations covering the events.

Even video from the US trials in swimming and track will have to be pulled before the Aug 7 start of the games.

And to make sure that they can enforce this, NBC will be watermarking the IOC feeds. This will let them distinguish the video that NBC has paid a fee to control from that captured and uploaded by fans.

NBC hasn’t announced any watermarking since it made a deal with Teletrax in 2003 to mark newscasts to monitor usage by local television stations and others. Teletrax monitors what passes through the air as part of its “broadcast verification and intelligence services”. Based in London, it is a subsidiary of MediaLink Worldwide. Phillips Electronics has a minority interest in Teletrax.

It isn’t clear from the announcements which company will be making the ‘take down’ calls to web sites with offending Olympic video.

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About Author : Patrick Gregston is business development manager for USVO's SmartMark family of products.

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USVO is at the center of the universe- ok the world maybe.….

Good and bad in Wolverine theft and opening….

Pirates convicted!

Hollywood mulls its good fortune

No time like crisis time

All the news that fits

Losing the News battle

Late holiday gift from Apple

You can’t stop this train

Olympic marks

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