New System Removes Hurdles of Traditional Watermark-Based Technologies to Enable Content Owners to Validate Aired Content Instantly and Comprehensively
COLUMBIA, Md. -- Jan. 22, 2008 -- XOrbit® an innovative designer of management systems for terrestrial broadcasters and cable networks, today announced the release of its groundbreaking new content delivery confirmation system, ProofPositive™. ProofPositive offers broadcasters, cable channels, advertising agencies, and other content originators a foolproof and comprehensive system for instantly validating the correct delivery of their content over the “last mile” of the broadcast chain, from the satellite or cable provider to the viewer‘s home.
Most traditional broadcast monitoring and verification systems attach a digital watermark to the content to identify it as authentic and unaltered, but these systems are incapable of detecting material that was not previously watermarked. In addition, the process of watermarking tens of thousands of content titles is costly and time consuming, and watermarking systems are only able to mark and verify brief instances or single-frame lengths of material rather than entire programs. Many broadcasters have been reluctant to adopt watermarking systems because they fear the process might somehow damage or cause technical problems with the content.
XOrbit has taken a completely different approach with ProofPositive by eliminating the watermark and deploying systems directly in consumer homes that can automatically capture aired programs in their entirety. The ProofPositive server installed in the master broadcasting facility then uses a complex algorithm to compare the stream from the consumer‘s location with the master broadcast stream. When ProofPositive identifies anomalies that drop below the broadcaster‘s predefined threshold, such as drop-outs, audio problems, signal preemptions, or irregularities with advertising delivery and local avails, the system automatically e-mails an error notification to the broadcaster. The notification provides a link to additional information on the alert including market and demographic data, as well as the actual video stream demonstrating the error that can be downloaded and analyzed by the broadcaster‘s engineers.
“Confirmation of actual content delivery has often been a major hurdle for broadcasters, and yet, it is a critical requirement,” said Steven Blumenschein, president of XOrbit, Inc. “ProofPositive removes the traditional barriers to validating aired content by making it much easier and cost effective for broadcasters to ensure that aired audio and video meet their quality standards, and to prove compliance with regulations such as closed-captioning mandates. Additionally, broadcasters and advertising agencies have a powerful, comprehensive, and immediate method of demonstrating to their paying customers that commercials aired as contracted.”
ProofPositive is the result of a joint development effort by XOrbit and one of its key customers, a major broadcast and cable network group that needed a more effective means of validating advertising content nationally. For more than a year, ProofPositive was successfully deployed in more than 200 metropolitan areas across the United States. The system proved to be so accurate and cost-effective that it quickly became the customer's preferred method for measuring distributed content on a national level. More information about ProofPositive can be found at www.xorbit.com.
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About XOrbit® Inc.
XOrbit® specializes in the design and development of advanced, broadly compatible caption automation, monitoring, management, and distribution solutions for the television and broadcast industries. With a family of tools that are feature-rich, extremely scalable, and highly reliable, XOrbit is committed to helping build its customers‘ business by improving operational efficiency and reducing operational costs. XOrbit products include the first commercially successful closed caption server, an FCC compliance system, type-on-video caption creation tools, and the ProofPositive™ watermark-free delivery verification network. XOrbit, Inc. is a privately held corporation based in Columbia, Md. More information on XOrbit is available at www.xorbit.com.
