Media Advisory: Digital Watermarking on the Rise with New Product Integration and Licensing Agreements

San Jose, Calif. — June 14, 2010 — The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) today announced that its members have seen a surge of activity in the licensing, commercialization and adoption of digital watermarking technology and solutions in the first half of 2010.

In the movie industry alone there is an estimated piracy loss of $3 billion annually due to the illegal distribution of committee screeners and other pre-release movies on DVD or over the internet. When one also considers losses related to the piracy of music, images and other media content, the total impact on various industries and brands can be daunting.

With the need to ensure digital content of all kinds can be easily tracked and monetized, the market and applications enabled by digital watermarking technology is expected to continue to grow. Members of the DWA continue to innovate and contribute to this market growth.

• Arbitron, AlpVision and AWT System all recently licensed a variety of patents from Digimarc Corporation, which is recognized for the quality and depth of its patent portfolio related to digital watermarking and other content identification technologies by The Wall Street Journal, IEEE Spectrum, and MDB Capital Group. These agreements allow the licensees to deliver digital watermarking enabled solutions across a range of industries including music, packaging, publishing, and advertising and marketing.
• Civolution has signed several agreements in which its unique watermarking as well as fingerprinting-based technologies will be integrated with many well-known names in media and entertainment, such as BBC Worldwide, Vizrt’s Viz Ardome media asset management software and Nagravision‘s Conditional Access system for Video on Demand service. It also expanded its relationship with Gracenote to launch Mediahedge a next generation content identification and monetization platform.
• aquaMobile continues to see the healthy adoption of its CLIC2C solution in Spain. The solution is now being used by Antonio Banderas’ wine brand, Anta Banderas, for its wine labels and packaging, and has helped LUIKE Publishing Group increase its readership by 38%. In addition, the use of CLICL2C is expanding across the European market, as aquaMobile recently signed agreements with Meiller Direct in Germany and Digital Space in the United Kingdom to offer the CLIC2C solution to publishers, brands and other marketers.
• Digimarc announced three new editions of its popular Digimarc for Images product, all of which are included in the Adobe Creative Suite 5. Digimarc for Images features advanced “Chroma” technology, which enables highly robust, pervasive, and imperceptible digital watermarks to be embedded into images such as digital photographs, illustrations and other artwork. Digital watermarks are easily embedded and read using Adobe® PhotoShop® and Photoshop Elements.
• On Monday, June 7, the Digital Watermarking Alliance held a free, hour-long webcast titled “The Case for Content Identification: Supporting New Business Models and Effectively Managing Key Business Assets” which showcased a forward-thinking discussion about how digital watermarking can address this issue as well as enhance consumer media experiences. The whitepaper discussed during the call can be downloaded here on the DWA site.

About Digital Watermarking

A MultiMedia Intelligence study identified digital watermarking and fingerprinting as a key growth market that could surpass $500 million by 20121. Digital watermarking is the process by which identifying data is woven into media content, giving it a unique, digital identity. Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognized by special software detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast – without affecting the quality of the content. Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and enable rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models. Today, digital watermarks are broadly deployed with billions of watermarked objects and hundreds of millions of watermark detectors in the market, supporting various commercial and government applications.

About the Digital Watermarking Alliance

The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is an international alliance of industry leading companies that deliver valuable digital watermarking technology and solutions to a broad range of customers and markets around the world. Member companies include aquaMobile, Civolution Digimarc, ISAN, MarkAny, MSI, Université catholique de Louvain, Verance and Verimatrix. For more information, please visit www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

CONTACT: For media inquiries, please contact Gina Giachetti of About Communications, Tel: 510-858-8111, E-mail: about.communications@gmail.com