Persistent And Robust Tracking of Entertainment Content (PARTEC)

The preparation and processing of digital audio visual data when commercialising filmed entertainment and broadcast content involves working with significant numbers of large media files, particularly when adapting media for multiple formats, delivery mechanisms, territories and languages. The industry is moving towards workflows that are file based, necessitating the copying and transfer of digital assets amongst the many parties involved in the value chain, including studios, post production facilities, authoring houses, electronic retailers and others. Media asset management (MAM) systems have been helpful for building inventories of content, yet the detachment of assets from their associated metadata gives rise to many challenges for reliability, quality and security, and hinders commercial exploitation. This project will deliver a new, unique solution to enable digital media assets to be maintained with their associated metadata persistently, robustly and in a way that is compatible with existing workflows and systems. The solution will build on new innovative applications of UK originated digital fingerprinting and watermarking research such that asset files can be quickly and uniquely identified and tracked. An additional benefit of the approach is that it affords a level of security to prevent unauthorised access to protected data, and enables each copy of an asset file to be identified with the party to which it was supplied. The system is applicable to all aspects of commercial exploitation of film and video content, including theatrical, home entertainment and broadcast, and will be inter operable with existing databases and MAM systems.