Philips has launched a forensic watermarking tool that marks broadcast TV and allows pirated material to be traced back to a single set-top box.

VTrack is designed for use in set-top boxes and integrated digital TVs and should make subscription TV broadcasters a little happier in the fight against pirates. If a pirate makes illegal copies of a programme or movie and sells them on, the watermarking technology can be used to track it back to the set-top box used and its owner. VTrack cannot prevent piracy but Philips is hoping it will act as a deterrent to those planning to sell copies of pirated material.

The company said VTrack supports standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) content and is format independent, which means it can be used for current and next-generation codecs like MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC and VC-1. It is also robust and cannot be separated from the content or altered. Philips claimed that even with severe quality degradation of the video, pirated content can still be traced to a specific TV subscriber.

“The main piracy threat in PayTV so far has been theft of service, which has been addressed by Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management. Now with the increased availability of HD devices and content, the capture and distribution of high quality content copies is a new threat requiring a different approach,” says Alex Terpstra, CEO of Philips Content Identification.

Broadcom, TI, ST and others have agreed to incorporate VTrack into their chipsets.

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