Smart Screen Exclusive

For two decades now, Beaverton, Ore.-based Digimarc has been working toward one goal: be the barcode of everything.

The digital watermarking technology provider enables the embedding of information into most everything you can think of: audio, video, images, print, even objects. With the company’s Discover ID Manager, imperceptible IDs can be put into images, text and audio without additional software, and its anti-piracy Guardian offerings uses publisher-provided metadata to detect infringing copies of protected content on peer-to-peer networks and elsewhere online.

The team at Digimarc took the time to chat with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) to go over the identifier needs of today’s M&E industry, how the company helps content owners advance mobile consumer engagement, and which companies have made especially good use of Digimarc technologies.

MESA: What was the impetus for Digimarc, and what media and entertainment industry needs does the company help fill?

Digimarc: We enable media and entertainment organizations worldwide to enrich everyday living with the means to identify all forms of content, including audio, video and imagery.

All of Digimarc’s solutions reflect a unified vision of enriching everyday life via pervasive, intuitive computing. We accomplish this by creating a new means of communication — based on digital watermarking technology — that can be embedded into media and objects, allowing computers and digital devices to see, hear and engage with the world around them much like people do. The result is that consumers can easily access digital content when, where and how they want it.

For example, SourceAudio, the worlds leading music licensing search and distribution platform and global leader in digital identities now uses Digimarc to verify rights holders’ royalty collections from PROs and more accurately substantiate track title identification, track ownership and license authority. Digimarc’s digital identity technology gives SourceAudio the capability to quickly identify unique audio such as short clips, or tracks that have been repurposed or included in a mix and avoids the identification weaknesses and inaccuracies of fingerprint-based solutions and high frequency signals.

MESA: How does Digimarc help content owners advance mobile consumer engagement with programs and advertising, and connect viewers with social networks directly via programming?

Digimarc: Content owners can trigger engaging and informative branded mobile experiences from radio and television content while retaining complete creative control. Digimarc Discover enables imperceptible, measurable and monetizable portals to mobile web content from recorded programming and commercials to build brand loyalty and drive mobile commerce.

Using any mobile device running the Digimarc Discover app, your audience can automatically discover Digimarc-enabled programming or commercials and be instantly connected to brand-defined mobile content from a Facebook page or video to a sweepstakes entry.

MESA: Where does Digimarc’s Discover SDK come into play for M&E mobile app developers, and can you offer any specific use cases where media and entertainment companies have put it to use?

Digimarc: Mobile app developers can use the Digimarc Discover SDK to incorporate Digimarc ID-reading capability into their mobile app. The Digimarc Discover app is built on Digimarc’s patented Intuitive Computing Platform (ICP) that relies on a proprietary mix of image and audio identification technologies — including QR codes, barcodes and Digimarc Barcodes — to power immediate recognition of media and physical objects with unsurpassed speed and accuracy.

Cooking Light is one of Digimarc’s longest standing Digimarc Discover customers. Using the Scan It, Cook It app powered by Digimarc, Cooking Light helps more than 11 million consumers every issue discover and prepare healthy food.

Shazam has integrated Digimarc’s patented visual recognition technology, which enables branded, measurable experiences on mobile devices, into its popular Shazam mobile app. Shazam also announced a range of partnerships with leading brands to Shazam-enable their products with this new functionality, including The Walt Disney Company, Target, HarperCollins Publishers, Esquire, Time, The Wall Street Journal and others.

Given Shazam’s more than 100 million monthly active users, visual recognition with the app provides a near-frictionless way for brands to drive deeper, more impactful engagements with a massive audience that requires only a single tap.

MESA: On the content protection side, Digimarc touts its digital watermarking as a superior option to digital rights management. What makes Digimarc’s solution unique?

Digimarc: Unlike DRM, Digimarc is not expensive, does not require users to navigate additional layers to access their content and does not prevent sharing across a customers’ enabled devices.

Other significant differentiators that lead customers to select Digimarc over DRM include: Being impossible to crack, offering visible text reminders to users that their file is traceable and helping pinpoint illicit distribution so they can take appropriate action.

MESA: What’s next for Digimarc? What platforms and/or businesses would the company like to expand to next?

Digimarc: For 20 years Digimarc has been providing solutions to creators and content owners in video, audio and imagery and just recently won an Emmy Award for its engineering creativity in the audio/video and television industry. We are aggressively introducing new tools and methods of monitoring and monetization for these members and in particular for integrators to provide robust industry solutions. At the same time, our core technology is fueling a fundamental change in retail operations and consumer engagement that is applicable to a wide variety of market solutions. These include product manufacturing, inventory management and reordering, and logistics.