MUMBAI: Global broadcast intelligence company Teletrax has reached agreement with news agency Reuters Television to expand its monitoring footprint in key strategic worldwide regions.
Teletrax says that it offers the first and only digital video monitoring and content tracking service that provides vital television intelligence on a global scale to video providers such as entertainment studios, news organisations, TV syndicators, and the advertising industry.
Teletrax is a joint venture between Phillips and Medialink.
At NewsXchange, the international news industry conference attended by more than 400 delegates from news organisations, Teletrax executives outlined the expansion of services to be provided to Reuters and Teletrax's development of an array of new services: software tools to watermark content in both standard-definition and high-definition formats; software upgrades for watermarking digital, broadcast-quality MPEG-2 video files and for facilitating network integration into existing production systems; an easier- to-use interface; and an enhanced underlying technology that inserts a more robust, yet still imperceptible, watermark.
Teletrax will add more than 30 new channels to its current global monitoring capability beginning in January 2007. To service Reuters' needs, Teletrax will build monitoring sites in Dubai, Taipei, Taiwan; Seoul, South Korea; and Istanbul, the Turkish capital. Reuters requested the additional channels to track its news broadcasts more comprehensively across the globe, with these geographic areas becoming increasingly important to its activities.
Reuters has been using the Teletrax suite of broadcast verification services to track ssubscribers' actual usage of its news video across the world for more than four years.
Reuters Television MD Tony Donovan says, "We have been very pleased with the intelligence Teletrax has been providing us on the use of our news coverage, and appreciate the way that Teletrax has evolved to meet our changing needs.
"The data we receive provides us with very valuable editorial, marketing and developmental information, and has become central to our broadcast operations. In a logical progression of our partnership, we wish to expand the territories in which we monitor video so we are able to build a more detailed, complete, and ultimately,more global picture of how broadcasters use our news content."
Teletrax's technology embeds an imperceptible and indelible digital watermark into video whenever it is edited, transmitted, broadcast or duplicated. A global network of decoders, or "detectors," then captures all occurrences of the embedded video being transmitted via satellite, cable or terrestrially and generates tracking reports for the content owners.
Reports of individual broadcast airings are delivered online in near real-time to each client's custom-designed portal or in data file transfers. Each client's broadcast activity is updated dynamically, 24 hours a day, enabling clients to respond immediately to reported results such as changes in end-user preferences or detections of unauthourised use.
