Digital Watermarking Plays Exciting Role in Enhancing Entertainment Experiences for Consumers through Television, Magazines and Mobile Devices

San Jose, Calif. — July 10, 2012 — The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) today announced that several of its members have seen increased adoption and commercialization of their digital watermarking technology and solutions in the first half of 2012. Members of the DWA continue to innovate with digital watermarking to help create new digital entertainment experiences for consumers around the globe and a more secured, manageable and viable media ecosystem for rights holders.

Every day billions of people read magazines, listen to music, watch television, purchase movies on demand and use portable devices. The use of digital watermarking technology is making these entertainment experiences more secure, interactive and fulfilling than ever before.

“It is exciting to see digital watermarking technology blossom over the last few years into such a wide variety of applications,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. “It is now used routinely as a complement to encryption for protecting high-value content. But it’s also used in various ways to enrich content’s value, both to users and to content distributors.”

Magazines Create Exciting & Popular Print-to-Mobile Experiences for Readers

This year the 2012 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue became the first top 100 U.S. magazine to use the Digimarc® Discover platform from Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) to digitally watermark the issue’s stunning photos and bring them to life with complementary videos. Behind-the-scenes videos of the 19 different swimsuit model photo shoots can be launched by scanning the magazine’s cover and pages using the new mobile Swimsuit Viewer App for the iPhone, iPad and Android.

The only thing that might be more popular than a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover-model is Pinterest, which boasted 18.7 million unique users in March, 2012¹. Digimarc has introduced a Print-to-Pin℠ solution that lets the readers of the June 2012 issue of House Beautiful pin images directly from the “Kitchen of the Month” feature in the magazine to their Pinterest boards, using digital watermarks as the enabling technology. Several more popular magazines are set to become Pinterest-enabled in the coming months.

Television + Mobile Device + Digital Watermarks = Second-Screen Entertainment

The media industry is undoubtedly experiencing a period of unprecedented change with a clear shift in consumer viewing habits. A recent report from Nielsen² found that 88 percent of people who own tablets and 86 percent of those with smartphones in the US have used their devices at least once while watching television in the month of May, 2012.

Civolution®, through its state-of-the-art SyncNow™ Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), brings second-screen experiences to a whole new level. Using audio digital watermarking the SyncNow – 2nd screen solution enables identification and synchronization between (live) broadcast, on-demand or recorded television content. It allows for exciting interactive applications on companion devices (tablets, smart phones, laptops) to present compelling synchronized user experiences such as polling, voting, targeted advertising, direct purchases, etc., and has been deployed to sync apps to several international show formats.

Digital Watermarks Make Early-Release Videos-On-Demand Accessible

According to recent data from Infonetics, the global video infrastructure market grew 6% in 2011 to $803 million U.S.³ Additional research from the NPD Group shows that the current video-on-demand (VOD) market is ruled by Pay-TV services with revenues reaching $1.3 billion in 2011; in fact, 15 percent of U.S. consumers ages 13 and older used pay-TV VOD movie services from a cable, satellite, or fiber-optic provider in the twelve months ending August 2011, which translates to 40 million users.

As mandated by Hollywood studios for offering movies in an early-release window, operators need to integrate transactional digital watermarking protection into their VOD workflow and network infrastructure, which allows for forensic tracking to the source of potentially illegal copies. Contributors to growth in this market are Verimatrix and Civolution.

Verimatrix’s StreamMark™ server-side forensic watermarking solution has been fully integrated with video-on-demand (VOD) server equipment from leading vendors ready for commercial real-time stream by stream payload insertion.

The end-to-end StreamMark solution has been deployed with several major US cable operators for early-release VOD trials, which are part of a trend that will open up new revenue opportunities and provide key service differentiation in the market. StreamMark can be deployed as a standalone component to an existing cable network infrastructure or as an integrated part of a complete Verimatrix revenue security solution.

SeaChange and Civolution recently announced they have created a joint solution that — for the first time — enables cable operators to offer premium VOD content to their subscribers. In order to do this, SeaChange integrated Civolution’s newest NexGuard watermark preprocessor and smart-embedder software into its intelligent video software platform. The solution has been deployed by a large North American cable operator.

About Digital Watermarking

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 Civolution, Datamark Technologies, Digimarc, ISAN International Agency, MarkAny, Media Science International, Technicolor, Université catholique de Louvain and Verimatrix. For more information, please visitwww.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

Follow the DWA on Twitter

To keep up-to-date with the latest news from the DWA and about digital watermarking, follow the DWA on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DWA_Org

Contact

For media inquiries, please contact Gina Giachetti of About Communications, Tel: 510-858-8111, E-mail: ginag@aboutcomms.com

Disclaimer

Digimarc Corporation is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Pinterest, Inc.

¹From ComScore, as reported by The New York Times on April 17, 2012
²Global Online Consumers and Multi-Screen Media: Today and Tomorrow
³Video on Demand (VOD) and Encoder Equipment and Video Subscribers