MEDIA ADVISORY: Digital Watermarking Alliance Reports New Options for Deploying Digital Watermarking, and Increased Adoption across the Media Landscape

Las Vegas, Nevada, April 10, 2008 — Adoption of digital watermarking by media companies and technology providers to manage and secure digital content across many new forms of distribution is increasing, while more and more media content contains the feature, according to the Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA). The DWA is an international group of industry leading companies involved in commercializing digital watermarking solutions.

Recent industry developments and news demonstrating continued momentum for digital watermarking solutions include:

• “A MultiMedia Intelligence study identified digital watermarking and fingerprinting as a key growth market that could surpass $500 million by 2012¹. “Applications leveraging digital watermarking are expanding, as the technology moves into multiple key roles,” said Mark Kirstein, president of MultiMedia Intelligence. “Media owners and advertisers are seeking more visibility and metrics on usage and distribution, or wish to monetize and control the content as it is distributed via the Internet, peer-to-peer, and social networks. There are many new offerings in the market that rely on digital watermarking to make this possible. Likewise, companies are positioning digital watermarking for integration into set-top boxes to support early release of HD programming, and others are incorporating watermarking in next generation Blu-ray devices.”
• The DWA will be represented at the Digital Hollywood Spring conference May 8, 2008, on the “Next Generation P2P and Film” panel.
• Cinea, a Dolby company, announced it has signed two new technology partners for its digital watermarking solutions. SecureMedia is incorporating Cinea’s technology into its IPTV content security offering to enable content owners and system operators to track content origin and distribution information right down to the specific transaction or device. For more information, visit http://www.cinea.com/press/032008_SecureMediaCinea.pdf. Cinea has also announced that Broadcom Corporation, one of the world’s largest fabless semiconductor manufacturers, is integrating Cinea’s Running Marks™ solution into Broadcom’s system-on-chip (SoC) decoder platform. The resulting technology will be made available to all Broadcom customers with a Cinea Running Marks license, including set-top box vendors, conditional access vendors, and cable, telecommunications, and satellite system operators. See http://www.cinea.com/press/0802_Cinea_Broadcom.pdf
• The Nielsen Company and Digimarc Corporation announced a new service — Nielsen Digital Media Manager — that will enable media companies, social networks, peer-to-peer services and user generated content sites to monitor and manage the distribution of media content across the Internet. Nielsen already uses digital watermarking to encode 95% of national television programming for its television ratings service, and the new service will focus initially on the online distribution of television content in the U.S. The companies expect these new solutions will commence live beta testing in May. Visit http://www.nielsen.com/media/2007/pr_071205.html or http://www.digimarc.com/media/release.asp?newsID=610
• Philips is integrating digital watermarking into its line of hospitality television sets and will soon support a full range of HDTV sizes, including 26″, 32″, 37″, 42″ and 52″. Hoteliers have long enjoyed an early-release movie window that allows them to entertain their guests with box-office hits prior to release on DVD. The Philips VTrack digital watermarking solution is designed to ease concerns about piracy that have led certain content owners to withhold high-definition media from this advance window. In addition, Philips has announced that five major Hollywood movie studios have approved Philips’ CineFence forensic marking of digital cinema soundtracks to deter piracy.
• Teletrax has signed contracts with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Atlas Agency, the largest news and distribution agency in Spain, and Agence France-Presse, the leading global news agency, to electronically monitor usage of their news content. The company also added three new direct response advertising clients to its roster, including G2 Direct & Digital, Kent Creative Group and Gold Mountain Media, Inc. All will use the Teletrax® suite of broadcast intelligence services to monitor and track broadcast, cable and satellite television airings of their direct response advertisements. In addition, Mercury Communications, the largest independent measurable media company in North America, signed a four-year contract renewal with Teletrax to electronically monitor and track airings of it long and short form direct response television advertisements. Visit www.teletrax.tv/index.php/News/Teletrax/ for more information.
• Thomson recently announced that Moovyplay has selected NexGuard™, Thomson’s state-of-the-art content security solution suite, for implementation into its portable movie rental service. Moovyplay is a venture developed by Paris-based CPFK, France’s leader in DVD rental services with 2,200 outlets under three retailer brands: Video Futur, Cinebank and Video Pilote. The partnership marks the first integration of a digital video watermarking solution into a portable video device. NexGuard will be embedded into customized handheld devices created both by Moovyplay and Archos, which will allow customers to conveniently rent movies by loading dozens of titles at one time from an in-store kiosk onto their device. For more information, please visit: http://www.thomson.net/GlobalEnglish/Corporate/News/Pages/
  movieplay-video-rental-service.aspx
• Widevine Technologies has partnered with Digital Latin America (DLA) to secure premium content for digital pay-TV operators throughout Latin America. Widevine will encrypt and watermark content that DLA delivers to 23 countries to fulfill content owners’ requirements for licensing high-value videos and popular programs. Digital Latin America delivers premium, high value content via satellite and IP to 100% of the MSOs in 23 countries and to 51 systems across Latin America and is the only provider in the region that delivers video on demand and pay-per-view services with blockbuster movies from major Hollywood Studios including Disney, MGM, Paramount/Dreamworks, Warner Bros. and NBC Universal, as well as international studios.

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.

CONTACT: For media inquiries, please contact John Raffetto (Tel: (206) 264-1555; E-mail: john@rhstrategic.com)

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, Cinea, Inc., a Dolby company (NYSE:DLB), DataMark Technologies, Digimarc (Nasdaq: DMRC), GCS Research, Gibson, ISAN-IA, Jura, MarkAny, MediaGrid, Media Science International, Philips Electronics, Signum, Teletrax (Nasdaq: MDLK), The Nielsen Company, Thomson (Euronext 18453; NYSE: TMS), Université catholique de Louvain, Verance, Verimatrix, and Widevine Technologies. For more information, please visit www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

¹ “Beyond Traditional DRM: Moving to Digital Watermarking & Fingerprinting in Media Monetization”published by MultiMedia Intelligence, January, 2008.