Archive for July, 2008

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.

My apologies for not posting, as there has been quite a backlog of work since the Telecosm event. One of the requests given to me was to articulate a bit the distinctions of the various terms used here regarding ‘the motion picture industry.’

“The Industry” as it likes to refer to itself, used to be a collection of companies that were based either in New York city or the greater Los Angeles area, and which had studios where their product was produced for distribution in theaters that the companies owned all over the United States. In the early 50s, these companies (‘the industry’) was forced to divest the theaters by the courts. This consent decree, along with the arrival of television in our homes, and the aging of the moguls who had founded the companies, led to an unraveling of the “studio system”.

“Hollywood” was the generic term applied to ‘the industry’ even though the physical locations of the studio facilities were spread all over the Los Angeles area. Of the original companies, only Paramount and Columbia were actually in the geographic area of Hollywood, which in the earliest silent film days did host a very high density of the many entrepreneurial start ups that had fled the east coast and Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Company, which had sought to claim a royalty on every film produced.

Today, these three terms- “the motion picture industry,” “The Industry”, and “Hollywood” have come to be applied to a wide variety of companies, and enterprises that are hardly homogenous, geographically proximate or even within the sector of motion pictures. Dominated by the big six – Fox (or NewsCorp) Paramount (Viacom), Disney, Warner Bros (Time Warner) Sony (comprising MGM, Columbia and Unitied Artists) and Universal/NBC (GE) which themselves are all part of multinational conglomerates, with activities and products in music, television, computer games, theme parks, publishing in all manner of forms – the business sector that falls under these names also includes thousands of content creation, service businesses, and related enterprises (talent agencies, unions, hardware suppliers, equipment vendors, dedicated health care etc.).

Geographically their market is truly global, crossing national, cultural, and language barriers. While “Hollywood” does not produce as much screen minutes as Bollywood in India, or the largely unknown production center of Shaighai in China, it nonetheless dominates the world market in income and sets the standards in quality, and methods.

This is why USVO focuses it attention on those big six companies, who distribute the most motion pictures with the largest value in the world. It is these companies that have the greatest opportunity, and threat, presented by the revolution in digital communications that computing and internet technologies provide.