Philips Unveils a New Video-dedicated Watermark Technology

Philips unveiled at the NAB 2007 a new video-dedicated watermark technology entitled VTrack. As equivalent watermark system from Thomson, the VTrack is embedded into the video signal and used as a unique identified allowing copyright holders to track down potential pirate of video contents.
If this technology is primarily targeting set-top boxes and integrated digital TVs it could also interest online video stores, as Philips claims that the digital tagging can not be separated nor altered from the original video content even after cropping, compressing, re-encoding or even camcorder copying. So the first purchaser of the video supposed to be the one to be the first the share illegally the content on P2P network could be easily identified thanks to VTrack. This technology is compatible with the most popular video high-definition video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC and VC-1).
This technology is much less restrictive for consumers than the standard DRMs as it is mostly there to track down illegal sharing of video contents than to limit the ease of use of a video purchased online.