Civolution and Gracenote Expand Relationship to Launch Content Identification and Monetization Platform

‘MEDIAHEDGE’ Allows Content Owners and Service Providers to Protect and Monetize Copyrighted Content

EMERYVILLE, Calif. — Civolution and Gracenote® today announced an expanded long-term agreement by jointly launching and selling Mediahedge, the next generation audio and video content identification platform that enables content filtering, monitoring and monetization for content owners and Web 2.0 service providers. Civolution and Gracenote will be demonstrating Mediahedge at the NAB Show™ next week in Civolution’s booth # SU6502.

The Mediahedge platform combines Civolution’s video fingerprinting and Gracenote’s audio fingerprinting identification technologies with extended content registration and identification tools, and now fully leverages Gracenote’s Global Media Database, the world’s largest and most comprehensive media database. This combined platform, which will be operated as a hosted service, offers a comprehensive and reliable means to protect, control, measure, and commercialize the use of copyrighted audio and video content.

According to a September 2009 report from Ipsos MediaCT, 67 percent of Internet users have streamed or downloaded digital video. As a result, there is a growing need to identify copyrighted content as it is distributed across computers and mobile phones around the world. “By integrating Gracenote’s and Civolution’s market-leading identification technologies to create Mediahedge, we are able to offer content owners a complete solution for tracking, filtering, measuring and monetizing their assets,” said William Schulze, Director of Business Development, Gracenote. “This comprehensive system, and our expertise in the market, will be essential for any customer wanting to capitalize on the vast opportunities presented by digital video and audio on the Internet.”

“Media stakeholders now have an opportunity to tap into a world-class service platform to unlock new business models and generate additional revenues,” said Hans van de Ven, SVP Business Development, Civolution. “This is where technology meets monetization.”

When integrated into the back end of online services which offer User Generated Content (UGC), the Mediahedge content recognition platform allows content publishers to automatically identify large volumes of content at the time of upload, allowing pre-defined business rules to be applied before copyrighted material can become publicly available. These rules can vary, ranging from content being blocked before publication through re-directing users to specific websites to linking content to targeted advertisements.

Mediahedge also offers its customers access to a pre-populated and constantly growing hosted database with the fingerprints for millions of music assets and tens of thousands of movie assets and associated metadata. Mediahedge allows content owners to register and store their own fingerprints and content metadata via easy-to-use, and simple to integrate content registration tools.

Gracenote will be marketing and selling Mediahedge in North America and Japan, while Civolution will cover the European markets.