Whatever happened to Autonomy you may ask and this week watchers of digital video would have been answered by its entry into the market for monitoring copyrighted materials, right on cue for offering all those big US content owners a way of keeping track of their content as it emerges onto YouTube.
Autonomy was one of the big hits of the dotcom economy, that got big on searching for things on your behalf, based on what you were doing at the moment. Its core technology was to take content and index it using the juxtaposition of key text items in documents and then finding similar documents or web sites.
It was that technology that perhaps made it interested in buying a company that did something similar with video, and it is from that Virage subsidiary that the ACID (Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection) system has emerged.
In essence this is an opportunistic play. Virage usually serves companies that have their own video to index, and boasts that its Videologger application allows customers to search video across a range of parameters
including audio, scene, speaker, location, key frame, image, on-screen
text, face, token and the concept behind the content.
Because it doesn’t require any manual tagging it will create a unique index for each piece of video based purely on what’s happening on the screen, and so although it doesn’t require a watermark to be placed on the video, in effect its own encoding system works in much the same way, creating the exact same values for a piece of video based on the content. By indexing and searching a content owners own content, it can compare with other video on a wide range of sites on the internet and track any copyright breaches.
Most other similar technologies require that there is a special watermark placed in content to do this and if that hasn’t been done prior to copyright breaches being found, they mostly won’t work.
This is not the first time that Autonomy technology has been used for video. One of the previous CTOs, Suranga Chandratillake, went on to form Blinkx and he licensed some of the technology he worked with at Autonomy, as part of the Blinkx technology.
Virage also says that a wide range of languages can be used with its ACID product and by which we understand that if video is on a site with audio replaced by Arabic, Mandarin Chinese or Russian, it will still find the copyright breach.
Again so will a watermarked system, but it has the requirement that content owners have to go to the trouble of watermarking content first.
“With the explosion in interest around video sharing and distribution over the Internet, copyright owners must act rapidly to stay ahead of the rising tide of illegal copies of their content. With Autonomy’s Meaning Based Computing technology and image and audio analysis expertise, ACID is a powerful solution to help media companies protect their assets, and video sharing websites to reduce their risk, while reducing administrative overheads for both,” said Mike Lynch, Autonomy CEO.