Justin.tv Fingerprinting Goes Live This Week

Justin.tv will be rolling out new technology designed to filter out streams of live, pirated video content beginning later this week, according to CEO Michael Seibel.

Speaking to an audience at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable, Seibel said that the digital fingerprinting technology, which was first announced in August, would go live in three days. By doing so, the live-streaming company will be able to automatically take down any live video streams that infringe on copyrighted content, without content owners needing to send takedown notices.

Justin.tv is enlisting the help of Vobile to filter videos, using the company’s MediaWise for Publishers product to scan live streams that appear on the site. Vobile then compares those streams against a database of video content that is known to be copyright-protected. Justin.tv had already been using Vobile to filter out videos that had been saved to the site, but extending that capability to live content is likely to further appease copyright holders.

Vobile has partnerships with six studios and three TV networks, which feed their content into its comparison database. Fox will be the first content company to take advantage of the technology.

Seibel said that Justin.tv has long worked with copyright holders to help get their content off the site, but it reached a turning point around the time of the 2008 Olympic Games. At that point, the company started building tools for content owners so that they could remove any channel without its direct intervention.

While the initial implementation will automatically take down any videos that are known to infringe, Vobile CEO Yangbin Wang says that the technology could also be used by rights holders to point consumers to higher-quality streams of the same content online or enable them to purchase the content.