Verimatrix Awarded Key Patents for VideoMark Forensic Watermarking

Pay-TV Industry’s First End-to-End Forensic Watermarking and Content Tracking Solution Achieves Technical and Commercial Momentum

SAN DIEGO — Verimatrix, setting the standard in content security technologies that enhance the value of pay-TV networks, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued patent number 7,430,302 for unique features in VideoMark™, Verimatrix’s user-specific, forensic watermarking technology. The new patent, the first of several pending for VideoMark, protects key processes where the forensic mark is invisibly and robustly embedded in video content, and converted to a human recognizable image during extraction. As has been proven in multiple system evaluations, a human readable mark withstands more sophisticated video manipulations such as cropping and geometric distortions, than those which rely on machine extraction alone.

Verimatrix’s end-to-end VideoMark solution includes the recovery of the unique client identification from all unauthorized analog and digital distribution formats. The mark extracted from pirated content, which never contains personal subscriber data, can be traced back to the last legal recipient of the content by the operator. A second patent, number 7,426,750 related to aspects of this tracking process, was also recently granted to Verimatrix.

“Verimatrix has been a pioneer in watermarking research. These new patents reflect the innovations of VideoMark and the hard work of our watermarking research team,” said Bob Kulakowski, CTO of Verimatrix. “In real world applications, VideoMark has exceeded stringent criteria that Hollywood studios have established for watermarking. In fact it has been deemed acceptable for high-definition content with early release windows, such as hospitality and premium content delivery services. We are seeing rapidly expanding commercial applications for this additional layer of content protection strategy, which links pirated content to an individual while maintaining privacy.”

VideoMark is the industry’s first secure and invisible content tracking solution that enables forensic, user-specific marking of video at each set-top box or PC client in a pay-TV system. A range of worldwide operators have deployed VideoMark to enable them to offer differentiated services including early release windows for HD and super premium content.

VideoMark is a powerful security layer that can be seamlessly integrated with Verimatrix’s Video Content Authority System (VCAS™) and complements encryption, conditional access (CA) and digital rights management (DRM) technologies and is being required by more content owners. VideoMark complies with the rigorous requirements of the Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI).