Digital distribution supplier Destiny Media is seeking a patent in the United States for its approach to “watermarking” media data.
The company is developer of the Play MPE system. Record labels use the encrypted system to deliver pre-release music to stations and buyers. Destiny said recording labels prompted it to develop its own standard to protect content against unauthorized copies.
“Forensic watermarking is expected to be a common feature of online digital media in the future and Destiny’s patent-pending technology provides numerous advantages over other solutions,” the company stated.
The company says other techniques “rely on transforms that can be extremely tedious and slow. Often, it can take 10 seconds or more to embed the mark into a typical song. In an online sales environment, this loads the server, while limiting simultaneous access to content.” Destiny claims its mark can be embedded in near real time.
It says other techniques require a tradeoff between sound quality and robustness of the mark. “Either the mark can be heard by audiophiles, or it is so light that it can be easily filtered.” It said labels tested its system and the MPE mark “was shown to be inaudible, even though it is nearly impossible to remove.”
And it says the trace survives file conversion and compression to as low as 32 kbps with at least a 99% recovery rate; and that an MPE mark can be recovered from an on-air radio broadcast or other analog format. “Even if a third or more of the watermark information is lost, the remaining MPE forensic information can still be rebuilt.”
