For the second time in two years, the Eindhoven based company Civolution will receive an Emmy. This high American award, handed out by National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, will be presented at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas on Sunday. Never before has a Dutch company managed to win a second Technology & Engineering Emmy Award. Civolution uses specialized techniques to prevent the illegal distribution of video content, but also, for example, to measure audience figures and link up the right advertisements.
Read more about Civolution here
While it was 2 years ago for Civolution’s watermarking technology, this time it’s for the company’s fingerprinting technology. “It proves that the first Emmy wasn’t a coincidence and that our innovative solutions have made a real impact in the United States,” says Alex Terpstra, Civolution’s founder, who has since sold three parts of the company.
Terpstra will receive the prize on Sunday together with CTO Jaap Haitsma. “Our guest of honour that evening will be Ton Kalker, former ‘Principal Scientist‘ at Philips Research, where it all started”. Kalker himself has been living in the US for many years since.
Civolution’s award-winning Video Identification Technology leveraged the company’s video fingerprinting techniques to become the first solution capable of identifying video content uploaded on User Generated Content websites during major live broadcast events. The solution was first deployed 10 years ago during the Beijing Olympics. Its capability to generate highly efficient video fingerprints from several tens of live broadcast feeds and making those available immediately for automated identification of video clips uploaded on the internet proved to be incredibly valuable to avoid online distribution of unlicensed content highlights before broadcast on NBC television in the USA. In other words: Civolution helps to prevent piracy of copyrighted video content.
Two years ago, it received its first Emmy Award for ‘Steganographic Technologies for Audio / Video’, based on its digital watermarking technology. Both technologies have been deployed in various Automatic Content Recognition applications globally and are used by the world’s largest media companies.
“We are truly delighted to receive a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for the second time,” said Alex Terpstra, Chairman of Civolution. “Winning such a prestigious award twice confirms that the technologies we brought to market made a real impact to the US television industry, where many billions of dollars of content revenues are at stake each year.”
Based on the High Tech Campus in the city of Eindhoven, Civolution was founded in 2008 as a result of the spin-out of Philips Content Identification. The company subsequently acquired Teletrax and Thomson STS in 2008 and 2009 and over the 5 following years became a world leader in content identification solutions. By serving both the television and the motion pictures industries with its Emmy Award-winning technologies, it enabled a variety of applications including broadcast monitoring, forensic tracking, content filtering, interactive television, audience measurement and advanced advertising. Between 2014 and 2016 Civolution sold three business units individually to Kantar Media, 4C Insights, and Kudelski.
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