Blue Spike Produces Highest-Fidelity Watermarking System for SDMI

Blue Spike Produces Highest-Fidelity
Watermarking System for SDMI

Company Says Key-based Systems Would Provide
Even Better Reproduction

NOVEMBER 13, 2000 -- In recently completed tests, Blue Spike's Giovanni audio watermarking technology achieved the highest fidelity of the remaining submissions to the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) Phase II watermarking trials, confirming the inherent advantages of the Company's digital watermarking systems.

By all statistical measures, the Giovanni watermarks were the least detectable of the three remaining watermark submissions to SDMI, which were recently put through "golden ears" listening tests. The testing results reaffirmed architectural decisions made by Blue Spike's engineers who defined sound fidelity as the most important design criterion for technology developed in response to SDMI Phase II Call for Proposals, followed by, respectively, computational performance and robustness.

Blue Spike CEO Scott Moskowitz said, "We are excited about our results and our performance, given that the testing protocol was largely beyond our control. We expect our digital watermarking technology will play an invaluable role in the debates about the management of copyright, given that we have specific expertise in the field and have developed advanced media-specific architectures designed to meet the requirements of the target constituencies."

Commenting on the design scheme that produced Giovanni's superior transparency, CEO Moskowitz said, "As with every other engineering problem, good design is about making good compromises. Giovanni was the product of some well-considered trade-offs. We completed exhaustive testing and examined a number of alternatives. In the end, nothing is totally secure; nothing is totally inaudible. Giovanni is simply the best solution that existing science makes possible right now."

Blue Spike Vice President of Business Development Gregg Moskowitz said "the most gratifying part of the listening phase was the transparency of the testing regime. SDMI made public the testing procedures and reported out the scores themselves in useful detail. That attention to laboratory discipline bodes well for SDMI's larger success in establishing durable, widely recognized standards."

Although Blue Spike has achieved a superior level of fidelity with its automated embedder, as required in the SDMI Phase II Call for Proposals, Blue Spike believes the forum may have greater opportunities in authoring specifications for key-based watermarking systems that rely on human judgments, as opposed to the automated coding and detecting systems for digital music that have been the focus of SDMI's development efforts thus far.

A key-based watermarking system, in the hands of an experienced audio engineer, would enable the most transparent embedding of watermarks for authentication and for copy control purposes. Ideally, during the mastering process the engineers' experienced ears and technical discretion would result in the most efficacious and inaudible placement of the watermark. To date, however, SDMI has not supported key-based interactive embedders and would not accept such a system as a response to the Call for Proposals, which specifically required automated embedding.

Blue Spike is the pioneer of key-based watermarking systems. Based upon extensive testing and the Company's core competencies in this space, Blue Spike has determined that digital watermarking regimes can only achieve their highest fidelity with key-based systems.

Both of Blue Spike's embedders, key-based interactive and automated embedders are fully compatible with the watermark detectors used in the Company's SDMI Phase II submission, therefore both are fully compatible with the Company's SDMI submission.