Video Fingerprinting Overview: Who's Doing What

The New York Times dubs it "content-recognition software"; others call it video fingerprinting. The idea is to create a kind of digital dragnet that would allow copyright owners to prevent snippets of their work from being uploaded to video-sharing sites, or circulated around the Net.

Who's developing this technology? Here's my short list (post a comment or e-mail me if you know of others):

- Advestigo (FT article ... NewTeeVee)
- Attributor (WSJ article)
- Audible Magic (Post-Gazette.com ... AP article)
- Virage, from Autonomy
- Gracenote
- GUBA's Johnny (Broadcasting & Cable article ... TechCrunch posting)
- Motion DSP / Ikena Copyright
- Philips (PC World article ... Philips explainer)
- Vobile
- YouTube

MIT's Technology Review magazine has an article that provides a good overview. Lots of challenges remain, as Brad Stone and Miguel Helft write in the NY Times today:

Systems that can identify video files hold even greater promise to improve relations between traditional media companies and Internet companies like YouTube. But the technology is not quite ready.

“Video is much more complex to analyze, and more information needs to be captured in the fingerprint,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm based in New York. He noted that there were also more ways to fool the technology — for example, by cropping the image.

Screening for video is also more difficult because of the sheer volume of new material broadcast on television each day, all of which must be captured in the database.

And deploying any type of fingerprinting technology can carry a price. Users tend to leave filtered Web sites and migrate to more anything-goes online destinations.