Content Identification Technologies And their role in the future of Ad Supported Content

1. Content Identification Technologies And their role in the future of Ad Supported Content

2. Activated Content • Media and Entertainment Services Company • Founded in 2001 • Customers include UMG, Sony / BMG, and Sterling Sound • Partners include Rimage, MediaMax, and IFPI • Embedded into Agnostic Media’s transcoding and IPTV offering. Evan Hill • Trained as a classical 4 fields anthropologist (Physical, Cultural, Archaeology, Linguistics) • Self - professed Luddite – technology is only of use if it makes our lives better. Receive 5 television stations at home, 3 of them with fuzzy reception. • Ten years of experience bringing (mostly useful) technology into the hands of new users in the travel, entertainment, and construction industries.

3. Fingerprinting (or hashing) • Reduces (or hashes) a known piece of content into a mathematical value (or fingerprint) that is unique to that piece of content. • Each piece of content that is to be identified “in the wild” must be pre-fingerprinted and the fingerprint placed in a database for lookups later on. Watermarking • Hides a piece of information, such as a barcode, into the actual content itself – not in some auxiliary data channel. • In theory, the hidden information is machine readable, but indiscernible to a human. Reality comes remarkably close to theory in this case. • The big difference between fingerprinting and watermarking is that multiple instances of a given piece of content can be individually watermarked, but will still fingerprint out to the same piece of content.

4. The Velocity of Content • New IP based distribution methods that encourage velocity and multiple on-demand transmissions have made it very difficult to sustain business models that rely on monetizing a single discrete transaction. • Ad supported content is a natural fit for these new distribution methods. However, the trick is to keep advertising connected to content as the content makes it’s way through a multiplicity of distribution systems. • Both Fingerprinting and Watermarking are good choices for this connection. • Television and paid content providers are facing this trend together. Television has the advantage of already knowing something about ad supported content.

5. The Value of Specificity • The more targeted an audience is, the more the advertisement can be sold for, because the conversion rate is higher. • In the face of IP based distribution methods, well targeted advertisement becomes the only option because consumption of advertising is almost universally at the choice of the consumer. • Content itself is becoming more targeted. Publishing models are migrating from one-to-many to many-to-many. The good news is that this has the potential of raising the value (intrinsic and monetary) of all advertising. • The catch is that the whole system has to get smarter. There will be more content, associated with more advertisements, serving more granular audiences. • Watermarking is uniquely suited as an identifier technology to handle this staggering multiplicity.

6. The Convergence of Virtual and Physical • The virtual world has a high level of participation, and that level is increasing, both in terms of number of people participating, and perhaps in terms of individual participation. • One of the advantages of the virtual world is that it is machine readable in a way that the physical world is not. This allows us to harness the power of machines to perform tasks so detailed and complicated they would not be worth performing by people. • The physical world is more machine readable every day. Along with disturbing developments in the area of personal liberty, there are also advancements that make our lives a little easier and better. • Both watermarking and fingerprinting allow machine readability of content in the physical (analog) world. This allows for the monetization of a portion of the distribution chain that was previously untapped.

7. A Vision for the Future

8. Making the World a Better Place? • Personal identity and context disintegrate in the face of rapid global homogenization (the growth of monoculture). • Many to many content creation and distribution, social networking, and online communities fly in the face of this trend, helping to create identity and context. • Material Culture serves primarily to reinforce personal identity and context, secondarily to fulfill the intended function. • Figuring out how to offer people items that reinforce their personal identities and social contexts is a public service, and a lucrative one at that. • Failing to figure it out might be dangerous to the future of your business.