Eindhoven, The Netherlands—Feb 21, 2006
Philips Develops Anti-Piracy Solution for Digital Cinema
Digital forensic watermarking technology traces illegally copied video and audio back to the scene of the crime
Philips Content Identification, a business group
within Royal Philips Electronics, today announced CineFence – a revolutionary
new system designed to help the movie industry in its battle against video
piracy. By embedding date, time and place watermarks into the picture and sound
track of digitally projected movies, CineFence allows moviemakers to trace
camcorder-captured copies back to the cinema in which the illegal copying took
place. Employing watermarks that are imperceptible to cinema audiences yet
maintain their integrity in the copied material, CineFence complies with the
forensic marking requirement of the Digital Cinema System Specification V1.0.
Illegal copying is estimated to cost the movie industry more than US$3.5 billion
per year, with camcorder recordings made by cinema goers identified as one of
the most important sources of content leakage. To help identify and control the
problem the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) has made forensic anti-piracy
technology a mandatory requirement in its Digital Cinema System Specification.
The forensic watermarks embedded in the picture and sound by CineFence remain
detectable even when camcorder recordings are compressed into formats such as
VCD, DivX, and MPEG4. The watermarking technology underlying CineFence is an
enhanced version of technology that has been deployed with great success over
the last three years during which time it exposed the origin of illegally copied
and distributed versions of major motion pictures intended only for film award
review prior to their official release.
In addition to being a valuable forensic tool for exposing and tracing illegal
copying, Philips watermarking technology can also be used in applications such
as broadcast and Internet monitoring, asset/media management and remote
triggering.
“Philips is committed to supporting the content industry in its fight against
piracy”, says Ronald Maandonks, CEO of Philips Content Identification. “We
foresee that in the near future all valuable digital content will be protected
by a watermark.”
Access Integrated Technologies (“AccessIT”) has announced its commercial
anti-piracy identification service for studios and other owners of digital
content, which is based on Philips CineFence technology. AccessIT can help these
content owners to analyze pirated content in an effort to trace it back to its
source release point (see www.accessitx.com).
Philips CineFence is part of an array of watermarking products commercially
available from Philips Content Identification.
