SeaChange and Civolution Announce Partnership for NexGuard Video Watermarking to Enable Premium VOD for Cable Services

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
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Upgrade of VOD systems with Watermarking Capability Will Meet Hollywood Studios’ Requirements for Early Release Movie Content Protection

ACTON, Mass. & EINDHOVEN, the Netherlands — NCTA The Cable Show 2011 — SeaChange International (NASDAQ: SEAC), a leading global multi-screen video software company, and Civolution, the leading provider of technology and solutions for identifying, managing and monetizing media content, announced an integration and distribution collaboration to offer NexGuard forensic watermarking for premium video-on-demand (VOD), critical for cable operators looking to launch Home Premiere services, as mandated by the Hollywood studios to grant access to early window content.

“Our partnership accelerates time-to-market for cable MSOs that want to launch premium VOD services with early release content from Hollywood studios,” said Paul de Bot, General Manager, Back Office and Monetization, SeaChange. “By working with Civolution, a leader in forensic watermarking for Hollywood digital movie content, we offer a safe choice for our customers who are increasingly requesting SeaChange to provide watermarking technology as part of its solutions offering.”

”We look forward to our partnership with SeaChange and to integrate our watermarking technology with SeaChange’s widely deployed VOD solutions,” said Alex Terpstra, CEO for Civolution. “NexGuard forensic watermarking solutions are already in operations worldwide in digital cinema systems, hospitality markets and direct to home (DTH) satellite operations. The technology is proven and meets the studios requirements for Home Premiere content, released ahead of DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The combined solution will help SeaChange customers worldwide to launch attractive new services in their existing or new VOD platforms for cable and TV everywhere.”

The NexGuard application for cable VOD includes a content pre-processing phase to ensure ease of integration, scalability and utmost performance upon streaming in MPEG-2 or H.264. To offer the most efficient operations upon content ingest this pre-processing is available either as a plug-in for transcoders or as a transparent standalone application able to pre-process content already prepared for cable distribution.

The solution is designed to be compatible with any VOD streaming server and all CAS and DRM encryption systems. The watermark embedding is performed on a per-VOD transaction basis upon streaming the content to the viewer by SeaChange or third party VOD servers.

The watermark detection from suspected pirate video samples, available through Civolution’s web-based automated NexGuard – Detection Service, helps content rights owners to identify the source of piracy with a fast turn-around in case of content theft. Civolution VOD watermarks can be automatically detected without the need for original content.