Nielsen, the company known for telling us which TV shows are popular, has a new technology that uses sounds from videos uploaded online and matches them with its database that already has 95% of TV shows indexed. Nielsen is rolling out the service as early as today and is hoping to work with companies like NBC, News Corp., and Google. Here’s how it would work:

When you try to upload a video clip onto a site that uses the Nielsen service (for example, think YouTube), the video will first be scanned and identified using watermarking or fingerprinting technology. Once identified, it will be checked against a database that holds information on video-distribution rules given by the media company that produced the clip. Right now, there seems to be three options: the video will be allowed to upload, it will upload but only after first attached to a piece of advertising, or it will not be allowed to upload at all.

The biggest distinction between this technology and what Google-owned YouTube is doing on its own is that YouTube never blocks content at the upload stage. Rather, it waits until after it has been uploaded and has been online (for who knows how long) before analyzing. Hollywood, of course, is likely to prefer the Nielsen method while consumer advocates are not pleased with the idea of automatic blockage of content, claiming it goes too far and possibly infringes on free speech rights based on the fair use doctrine of copyright laws which permit some replication of copyrighted content.

Having digitized 95% of national TV programming for its ratings service, Nielsen does have a bit of an advantage over the technology currently available. But will this advantage be enough to make up for its likely-to-be-unpopular methods?

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Published on: December 5th, 2007

Categories: Cyberlaw, TV & Online Video, Tech News, Web 2.0