Philips Launches New Forensic Watermarking Tool

"Complementing its extensive portfolio of content identification products, Philips introduces VTrack, an advanced watermarking technology that offers PayTV providers a new tool to get a grip on illegal content duplication and distribution.

VTrack embeds an imperceptible and indelible unique identifier into the video signal in a consumer friendly manner, as it does not restrict personal use and enjoyment of entertainment content, but pirated content can be traced back to a specific PayTV subscriber. By utilizing watermarking technology in set-top boxes, content pirates will expose themselves to greater legal risk if they attempt large-scale redistribution of improperly obtained content. Philips VTrack will enable content providers to confidently broadcast more high definition and early release material that is typically at higher risk for piracy.

The VTrack forensic watermarking product, designed especially for digital consumer devices such as set-top boxes and integrated digital TVs, provides the industry with an ideal solution to protect premium, copyrighted content spanning across PayTV, Video on Demand, and hotel TV. VTrack supports HD and SD content, is format independent and is therefore transparent for current and next generation codecs, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC and VC-1

VTrack digital watermarks are extremely robust and cannot be separated from the content or altered. Even after severe quality degradation of the video such as scaling, cropping, compression and even camcorder copying, the pirated content can still be traced to a specific PayTV subscriber."

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