Video Sharing websites roundup

Fingerprint Tech Waits for a Grand Entrance

Video sites such as Microsoft’s (MSFT) Soapbox and MySpace already employ fingerprinting technology from provider Audible Magic, and Veoh has said it will implement fingerprinting this month. A Dailymotion spokesperson clarified that the site will continue to use Audible Magic for audio fingerprinting, but is adding in Ina for video fingerprinting. He emphasized that the initial Ina rollout on Dailymotion is only in France, though the company expects it to be implemented across all versions of its sites by 2008.

Facebook Finance Chief Yu Becomes a Director at Vobile

Facebook Inc. Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu has joined the board of Vobile Inc., a closely held provider of so-called fingerprinting technology for identifying video content.
Mr. Yu, 36 years old, joined the online social-networking firm in July from YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google Inc.

One Anti-Piracy System to Rule Them All

Hollywood appears to have a preliminary winner in its bake-off of anti-piracy technologies.
For the last year, the film industry, through its Palo Alto-based R&D joint venture MovieLabs, has been testing a dozen so-called “digital fingerprinting” technologies. The technology purports to scan file sharing sites, Internet providers and peer-to-peer networks to identify copyrighted material.

“Fingerprinting Performance” (Leonard Kleinrock, 2007)

Yesterday in Los Angeles, people affiliated with the Motion Picture Association of America talked about the ongoing tests at a day-long anti-piracy workshop that the MPAA co-hosted with the University of California. In his introductory keynote at the event, UCLA professor and Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock showed a single slide that suggested that one of the anti-piracy filtering companies had outperformed the other 11, with the highest number of matches of infringing content and lowest number of false-positives. But professor Kleinrock and MPAA execs declined to name the participating companies or who had scored best on the test, saying that secrecy was a precondition for their participation in the tests.

Nevertheless, afterwards, executives from Santa Clara, Calif-based Vobile were crowing in the hallways of the Universal Hilton Hotel.
The two-year old company’s technology, called Video DNA, has apparently bested others from the Royal Philips Electronics, Thomson Software & Technology, and the highest profile digital fingerprinting company, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic, which has deals to filter video sharing sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox.

Movie Labs stress-tested the anti-piracy systems by loading hundreds of hours of copyrighted video content into the databases of the various filters, and then by flooding them with thousands of video files, some distorted, darkened and cropped, to try to scuttle their ability to find matches.
In the next phase of the ongoing tests, MovieLabs will see if the systems can handle ever larger quantities of copyrighted works. Theoretically, adding more songs, TV shows and movies in their databases could slow down these systems—and the Internet video sites that use them— since it could take longer to find possible matches.
MovieLabs has been sharing tests results with its member movie studios since the summer. MovieLabs chief executive Steve Weinstein says the technology is ready for prime time. “In a year you’re going to see many Internet companies using it. This technology has shown its viability.”

Full story at The New York Times

Another article in LATIMES

Battling Piracy, BayTSP-Style

“On an average day, there are 16 million violations that we’re finding,” said BayTSP spokesman Jim Graham. Of that, one million violations a month receive takedown notices. “Not all clients want to send takedown notices,” said Graham. “A lot just want to see the data on what’s available out there.”

Here’s how BayTSP works. A client gives it a list of titles (movies, TV shows, etc.) to monitor. BayTSP’s automated hardware then sniffs around major P2P sites, IRC, Usenet groups, public FTP sites and web sites and reports back its findings.

For P2P sites, if a title is found and the client wants to have it removed, BayTSP automatically generates a takedown notice that records the individual’s IP address, date and time identified, and sends it off to the ISP. The ISP then forwards the notice to the individual. Some ISPs and universities are adopting the open source Automated Copyright Notice System to automate the process of notifying infringers.

But what does all this cost? Between $25,000 and $500,000 a month, depending on how many titles you are searching and what services you want performed.

Full story here

The Wall Street Journal did a profile a couple months back:
- BayTSP employs more than 20 video analysts
- Analyst salaries start at around $11 an hour
- Viacom pays more than $100,000 a month to BayTSP
- BayTSP error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%