Nielsen Gets Into Digital Watermarking

DRM is getting a new player: Nielsen and Digimarc have announced a new service to watermark digital media to prevent online piracy and enforce copyrights.

The world of digital rights management may have just gotten itself a new major player: Nielsen Company—the same folks behind AC Nielsen, NetRatings, and Nielsen Media Research, and The Hollywood Reporter) and Digimarc have announced they will begin offering the Nielsen Digital Media Manager service in mid-2008. The service will employ digital watermarking to enforce copyright compliance in the use of digital media. Using the technology, clients will not only be able to track content online, but apply rules to how the content can be used and distributed—media companies will be able to specify how media can be shared, mashed up, or accessed.

The new service will initially focus on online distribution of television programming within the United States, but plans to expand out into movies, DVDs, music, video games, and other types of content as the program expands.

“Until now, the lack of an independent, industry-accepted identification and tracking service has limited the transactions that allow the delivery of media content over the Internet,” said Nielsen chair and CEO David Calhoun, in a statement. “Now with our new media identification and management services unique ability to identify content throughout the Internet, both content providers and distributors can protect and monetize the value of online media.”

Nielsen already uses watermarking technologies to encode U.S. television programming for tracking via its ratings services. Digimarc is a major player in identity and media management technology, providing systems that handle over 60 million personal identification documents (like IDs and drivers’ licenses) in more than 25 countries. Digimarc will license its digital watermarking patents and other parts of its portfolio to Nielsen for an undisclosed amount, and together the two companies will develop the Nielsen Digital Media Manager service, leveraging Nielsen’s infrastructure and media industry tie-ins.

Nielsen is, of course, touting the solution as a winner for the content industry, enabling content providers to lay out the rules under which their content can be distributed and repurposed, as well as offering ways to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and distribution media. Nielsen is also pushing the solution as a good thing for content distributors (who will be able to ensure the legitimacy of content posted to their sites), and consumers (who will supposedly see expanded digital content offerings).

What remains to be seen is what sites, software, and services will support Nielsen’s technology, and, as with other forms of rights management technology, in what ways it may infringe on consumers’ fair use of media. Time will tell. In the meantime, Nielsen is reportedly busy pitching the technology to major media companies like General Electric (which owns NBC) News Corp., and Google (which owns video sharing site YouTube).