Teletrax has secured a multi-year contract with World Television PLC to monitor the usage of the video news service British Satellite News (BSN), it was announced today by the digital video watermarking firm. Teletrax, a subsidiary of Medialink Worldwide Incorporated, is based in London, has offices in New York and Hollywood, and maintains its operations hub in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The contract with World Television, a communication solutions company that distributes BSN for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) of the British Government, represents a longer-term commitment and further expands coverage of world media, as compared to Teletraxs earlier work on behalf of the FCO in 2003.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Teletrax will monitor usage of the enhanced BSN service, a daily news feed providing reports about events in the United Kingdom. Channels monitored by Teletrax include major broadcasters in countries such as Syria, Oman, Qatar, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and China.
Using its award-winning service, Teletrax will report via a dedicated web portal the down-to-the-second details of video usage by global broadcasters. This broadcast intelligence enables World Television to rapidly evaluate the respective performance of individual news segments across a wide range of TV channels and countries. Knowing which of its stories broadcasters are airing and, as importantly, not airing allows the World Television news team to continually refine its editorial offering to meet the needs of its 440 broadcast clients across the globe.
We are extremely pleased to renew our relationship with the FCO, said Andy Nobbs, president of Teletrax. This agreement further demonstrates how critical content management is for news providers. In an ever expanding and fragmenting global TV marketplace, the ability to target the right news information to the right audience at the right time is crucial. Teletrax will help World Television achieve that ambition.
Launched in 2002 as a service developed by a joint venture between Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and Medialink, with an underlying technology that is patent protected both by Philips and Digimarc Corp., Teletraxs technology embeds an imperceptible digital watermark into video that is robust enough to survive strenuous editing, transmission, broadcast or duplication.
A global network of decoders, or detectors, captures every single broadcast occurrence of the embedded video, and that data is then presented in comprehensive reports to the original content providers as part of the Teletrax service. Reports of individual broadcast airings are delivered online in near real-time to each clients custom-designed portal or in data file transfers. Each clients broadcast activity is updated dynamically, 24 hours a day, enabling clients to respond immediately to reported results such as changes in end-user preferences or detections of unauthorized use.
Teletrax currently maintains a proprietary network of detectors that monitor the television broadcasts of over 1,000 channels worldwide. Its U.S. footprint includes more than 800 television stations and cable channels in more than the top 100 markets in the United States, representing more than 85% of all U.S. television households. Its international network monitors nearly 200 channels being broadcast from 50 nations and is comprised of 12 monitoring stations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South and Central America, and Canada.
World Television joins a growing list of leading news, entertainment and media organizations that have adopted Teletrax as the standard-bearer for tracking broadcast video content, including: The NBC Agency, Buena Vista Television, ABC Television Network, Tribune Entertainment, NBC Universal Television Distribution, NBC News Channel, Reuters Television, Mercury Media, Internet Broadcasting, Media Review International, and Medialink, Teletraxs parent company. A number of other entertainment, news and media companies are also currently testing the Teletrax service.