Given Hollywood’s growing anxiety over the amount of unauthorized copyrighted content that appears online, this New York Times’ piece by Brad Stone and Miguel Helft is a welcome, albeit abbreviated, primer on the state of video “fingerprinting” or content-recognition technology. On the heels of MySpace’s announcement last week that it will implement filters to identify copyrighted works, and amid YouTube’s delayed action to put up its own filtering system, tech companies are seizing on the ability to fill a market need.
But it’s not an easy task. Video filtering systems have to take into account far more variables, and a lot more content, than do audio filtering systems, which are fairly well advanced.
Audible Magic has stepped into the breach with what many believe is a killer filtering system called Motional Media I.D., and one start-up, MotionDSP, changed its business model recently to develop products that provide online video identifications. And many online video sites, such as Guba, have developed their own content-filtering systems.
But, as the article suggests, competing filtering systems could create havoc, or at least slow-down the evolution of the web-based video market. In all likelihood, one system may ultimately prevail at the end of the day. The MPAA, for one, is in the midst of reviewing proposals for just such a system that the trade group can recommend to its studio members.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:36 PM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
