Today Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG, AEX:PHI) announced the commercial availability of its CineFence forensic marking technology for both digital cinema image and sound. Five major Hollywood movie studios have approved Philips’ CineFence forensic marking of digital cinema sound tracks to deter piracy. The approval makes Philips’ CineFence the first forensic marking solution for both image and sound tracks for digital cinema.
The studios gave their approval for Philips’ CineFence image marking in 2006, and recently concluded extensive sound tests on Philips’ CineFence audio marking technology. CineFence supports forensic marking of up to 16 audio channels on a single Digital Signal Processor (DSP).
Illegal camcorder recording at cinema theaters has been identified as a major source of movie piracy. Since content pirates illegally record the image and sound tracks from different theaters, the movie studios adopted forensic marking as a mandatory requirement in the Digital Cinema Initiatives’ (DCI) Digital Cinema System Specification. Philips’ CineFence is the first forensic marking technology that fully complies with the DCI Specification and enables individual traceability of image and sound.
“Digital cinema offers theater patrons an unsurpassed experience in image and sound quality,” said Wade Hanniball, vice president, cinema technology, Universal Pictures. “Philips is the first to provide invisible and inaudible marking technology for both image and sound tracks. These marks will greatly aid in the industry's collective efforts to combat piracy in theaters. Universal is pleased to support the adoption of CineFence by digital cinema manufacturers.”
The CineFence marks are imperceptible to cinema audiences and yet maintain their integrity in illegally copied material. Comprehensive listening tests demonstrated that Philips marking technology does not make audible changes to the original sound tracks, but remains detectable even when recordings are compressed into pirate formats.
Philips CineFence is the world’s most widely deployed forensic marking solution for digital cinema and is part of an array of anti-piracy watermarking and fingerprinting solutions commercially available from Philips Content Identification, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics.
