• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 6, 2007

As we approach the end of 2007, we are finally starting to recognize the implications the U.S. transition to digital broadcasting will have on all the stakeholders of the television medium. And judging by the little app ticking away in the upper right-hand corner of the TV Board home page, we have something less than 437 days to figure it out. This week, the digital-savvy team at Interpublic's Initiative unit began providing yet another reminder, installing a similar digital countdown clock in the lobby of its New York headquarters. To be fair, and to give credit where credit's due, it was Initiative North America chief Richard Beaven who first gave me the idea nearly a year ago, when, during a breakfast meeting, he noted how ill-prepared people were for this digital inflection point, and how the industry needed a wake-up call. Then, shortly after that breakfast, he raided one of my best editors, Tom Siebert, to run communications for Initiative. I think Beaven got the better end of the deal.

But he also put some digital fire under my seat, which is one of the elements that led to the creation of the TV Board. I want to take this time to once again thank the starting team -- Carat's Mitch Oscar, Ball State's Mike Bloxham, Paradigm's Lydia Loizides, and TV industry visionary Jack Myers -- as well as regular contributors like Frank Maggio, Manning Field, and others, for helping to move the discussion forward. I'd also like to invite others to take the field and weigh in with your own thoughts about the future of the small screen. There's no monopoly on good ideas and good visions for television's future, and in recent months I've stumbled across some brilliant thinking coming out of agencies, advertisers and even some previously traditional-minded television companies. Watching Dave Poltrack's annual update at the UBS conference the other day assures me that he "gets" it. And from some recent conversations I've had with executives at NBC Universal, I know that they get it too. In yesterday's post, I made the case for how Google may be getting it most of all, and why its association with Nielsen was such an important bridge from our analog past to our digital future. Today, I'd like to discuss how Nielsen gets it.

Of all the players in the television transition, none have so much potential influence, nor so much at risk, as Nielsen does. For well over half a century of analog broadcasting through digital cable and satellite telecasting, Nielsen has been the glue that has held the television industry together, providing the context and continuity that enables television's market structure to work. And for all the criticism I've lavished on Nielsen over the years -- and there has been plenty -- I sometimes forget to point out how critically important its role is, and how it has sought to keep up with the times. This has been especially evident under Susan Whiting's reign as CEO. Long before the private equity guys were prowling at her door, she came up with a plan to that would transition Nielsen into the future, and bring the TV industry along with it. From where I stand, there are still a lot of flaws in the plan, but I have to remind myself that there is no perfect research -- and there are no perfect scenarios for measuring television now, during its transition, or whatever it ends up transitioning into. So I've got to give Whiting credit for putting the fire under Nielsen's seats too, and for taking an organization that historically had been painstakingly slow to change, and getting it to ramp up on all fronts.

Of course, Nielsen has a lot to gain from making the transition work. It gets to sell all sorts of new data, research products and services to a whole new swath of video platforms, all of which will be economically dependent on industry-accepted trading currencies. Usually, I focus on the kind of trading currencies that drive the television advertising marketplace. Today, I'd like to talk about how Nielsen is working to create a mechanism for a broader market structure surrounding the exchange of digital video rights -- the kind of rights that need to be tracked, managed and accounted for to ensure there is a smooth transition from static, analog television distribution to fluid, digital, multiplatform video consumption.

This was an issue that Viacom and CBS chairman Sumner Redstone said was paramount to the future of his business. Speaking at Nielsen and Dow Jones & Co.'s recent Media Money conference in New York, Redstone called for a "digital rights management system" that could track, account for and manage payments for the distribution of video content across a multitude of platforms, many of which will increasingly be controlled not by professionals, but by end-users themselves. The Internet clearly is emerging as an important -- if not the central -- distribution system for video programming, but without a trustworthy digital rights management system, Viacom or CBS might not know whether their content was appearing across a growing array of micro markets: online social network pages, user-generated and file-sharing video sites, or even individual blogs. How the economics of those rights might ultimately work out is anybody's guess, but without the means to reliably track them, Redstone implied, companies like Viacom and CBS will falter.

This week Nielsen unveiled a new service, and a plan it says will do just that. The service, dubbed Nielsen Digital Media Manager, initially was reported by the Wall Street Journal as being a "digital video cop" -- a system that would police where, when and how licensed video content shows up in unlicensed ways. But Dave Harkness, a long-time Nielsen exec who is heading the project, says it is far more than that, and is much more akin to the kind of digital rights management system that Redstone is kvelling for.

The system, which is built on the backbone of Nielsen's existing A/P coding system, which utilizes a combination of active and passive codes to ensure Nielsen can track the occurrence of video content anywhere and anytime, is being turbo-charged for the new digital landscape by Digimarc, a company that has become the leader -- and owns most of the patents -- in the emerging digital "watermarking" marketplace. The result is a system that can, to use Susan Whiting's phrase, "follow the video" no matter where it goes.

The system picks up where existing Nielsen services measuring traditional television and Internet platforms leave off. For example, Nielsen can track when a program airs on television, and even when that program migrates to a major publisher's Web site. What it could not track before this product, says Harkness, was what happens when an individual "likes the video, records it and posts it on some user-generated Web site."

What Nielsen still won't be able to track is what happens when people distribute copyrighted video content via peer-to-peer file sharing networks like BitTorrent, but Harkness says Nielsen is working on a separate solution to handle that soon. In the meantime, the new media management system will enable content owners, advertisers and agencies to track, define rules, and establish a marketplace around the fluid distribution of video programming as it migrates from TV to Web to user-generated sites, blogs, and social networks, and even via a host of new "distributed content" scenarios.

"We're not trying to police," says Harkness. "We're trying to build a system that has many of these value-added features that would increase the likelihood of using the Internet as a distribution system for [copyrighted] video."