The Stamford Advocate, Stamford, Conn.
By Richard Lee, The Stamford Advocate, Conn.
Sep. 22--A London-based international company can thank its Norwalk operations hub for garnering a big award for a technological advance that is becoming indispensable in the video industry.
Teletrax, a subsidiary of Medialink Worldwide Inc., was honored for its ShowTracker television monitoring service at the annual International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam last week. Technicians at the Norwalk facility played a key role in developing ShowTracker, a digital watermarking technology that allows video producers to monitor airing of their productions.
"Norwalk is the brain and backbone of Teletrax," said Lawrence Moskowitz, chief executive officer of Medialink Worldwide and a Greenwich resident. "They built the ShowTracker system and maintain it from Norwalk globally." The hub, which has about a dozen employees, monitors clients' programming in 110 United States markets. The unit's clients include NBC Universal, Reuters Television, Buena Vista and Mercury Media.
Teletrax maintains a network of detectors that monitor television broadcasts from more than 1,000 channels worldwide. Its U.S. footprint includes more than 800 television stations and cable channels, representing more than 85 percent of U.S. television households.
Its international network monitors nearly 200 channels. It has 12 monitoring stations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South and Central America and Canada.
The system can detect if television stations and other video media outlets are meeting contractual obligations in running programming and promotions, Moskowitz said.
Teletrax won the "Best Content Protection Technology for Video Broadcast" competition at Cable & Satellite International magazine's "Product of the Year Awards 2005" at the Amsterdam show.
Its new program tracking and monitoring service for longer programming was chosen from 173 entries, in 16 categories.
The award signals that ShowTracker is "best-in-breed technology," said Graeme McWhirter, chief executive officer at Teletrax, and can be adapted to different broadcasting applications.
ShowTracker also is increasingly being embraced by movie studios, television networks, syndicators, advertisers and news organizations, said Teletrax President Andy Nobbs.
"Teletrax is already providing an important monitoring service for short-form content like news and promotions, but this solution for long-form programming gives content and rights owners much greater clarity about what is happening to their assets once they have been distributed," said John Moulding, editor of Cable & Satellite International. Mercury Media in Santa Monica Calif., a direct response media buying firm, reached a long-term agreement with Teletrax in July to track airings of its direct response television advertisements.
Teletrax will monitor broadcast television and cable airings of Mercury commercial and infomercial placements in the top 100 television markets. "With Teletrax, we will be able to deliver far greater ease of use, accuracy and precision in our reporting of business results," said Dan Danielson, co-chief executive officer of Mercury Media and chairman of the Electronic Retailing Association.
Mercury's bookings have exceeded $1 billion in media buys, a volume that has been hard to track, he said.
"Teletrax has real-time reporting. With other vendors, it's a 24-hour update. That's real big," said Steve Nober, Mercury president and chief operating officer. "We're all about accountability and return on investment." Launched in 2002 as a joint venture between Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and Medialink, with underlying technology patent-protected by Philips and Digimarc Corp., 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 captures occurrences of the embedded video being transmitted and generates tracking reports for content owners. Reports of airings are delivered online in near real-time to each client and updated 24 hours a day, enabling them to respond immediately to changes in user activity or unauthorized use.
Barter playdates, in which programs are distributed with pre-sold commercials, can also be confirmed with advertisers.
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