Civolution and Gracenote Expand Relationship to Launch Next Generation Content Identification and Monetization Platform

EMERYVILLE, Calif., – April 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Civolution (www.civolution.com) and Gracenote® (www.gracenote.com) today announced an expanded long-term agreement by jointly launching and selling Mediahedge (www.mediahedge.com), the next generation audio and video content identification platform that enables content filtering, monitoring and monetization for content owners and Web 2.0 service providers.  Civolution and Gracenote will be demonstrating Mediahedge at the NAB Show™ next week in Civolution's booth # SU6502.

The Mediahedge platform combines Civolution's video fingerprinting and Gracenote's audio fingerprinting identification technologies with extended content registration and identification tools, and now fully leverages Gracenote's Global Media Database, the world's largest and most comprehensive media database. This combined platform, which will be operated as a hosted service, offers a comprehensive and reliable means to protect, control, measure, and commercialize the use of copyrighted audio and video content.

According to a September 2009 report from Ipsos MediaCT, 67 percent of Internet users have streamed or downloaded digital video.  As a result, there is a growing need to identify copyrighted content as it is distributed across computers and mobile phones around the world.  "By integrating Gracenote's and Civolution's market-leading identification technologies to create Mediahedge, we are able to offer content owners a complete solution for tracking, filtering, measuring and monetizing their assets," said William Schulze, Director of Business Development, Gracenote. "This comprehensive system, and our expertise in the market, will be essential for any customer wanting to capitalize on the vast opportunities presented by digital video and audio on the Internet."

"Media stakeholders now have an opportunity to tap into a world-class service platform to unlock new business models and generate additional revenues," said Hans van de Ven, SVP Business Development, Civolution. "This is where technology meets monetization.''

When integrated into the back end of online services which offer User Generated Content (UGC), the Mediahedge content recognition platform allows content publishers to automatically identify large volumes of content at the time of upload, allowing pre-defined business rules to be applied before copyrighted material can become publicly available. These rules can vary, ranging from content being blocked before publication through re-directing users to specific websites to linking content to targeted advertisements.

Mediahedge also offers its customers access to a pre-populated and constantly growing hosted database with the fingerprints for millions of music assets and tens of thousands of movie assets and associated metadata. Mediahedge allows content owners to register and store their own fingerprints and content metadata via easy-to-use, and simple to integrate content registration tools.

Gracenote will be marketing and selling Mediahedge in North America and Japan, while Civolution will cover the European markets.  

About Gracenote

A pioneer in the digital media industry, Gracenote combines information, technology, services and applications to create ingenious entertainment solutions for the global market.  From media management, enrichment and discovery products to content identification technologies, Gracenote allows providers of digital media products and the content community to make their offerings more powerful and intuitive, enabling superior consumer experiences. The company's solutions integrate the broadest, deepest, and highest quality global metadata and enriched content with an infrastructure that services billions of searches a month from thousands of products used by hundreds of millions consumers. Gracenote's customers include the biggest names in the consumer electronics, mobile, automotive, software and Internet industries.  The company's partners in the entertainment community include major music publishers and labels, prominent independents and movie studios.  Gracenote, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, is headquartered in Emeryville, California. www.gracenote.com.

About Civolution

Civolution is the leading provider of technology and solutions for identifying, managing and monetizing media content. The company offers an extensive portfolio of cutting edge watermarking and fingerprinting technology applications for forensic marking of media assets in pre-release, digital cinema, PayTV and online. Through its service portfolio Civolution offers broadcast and internet media intelligence and monetization solutions. Headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with offices in London, Rennes, New York and Los Angeles, Civolution was formed in October 2008 as a spin-off from Royal Philips Electronics combining synergies from Philips CI, Teletrax and Thomson STS. For more information visit: www.civolution.com.

SOURCE Gracenote