• by April 15, 2008

Media buyers and agencies are among those targeted for a new real-time TV content monitoring service that has just launched in beta in the New York market. Some 20 national networks and local stations are being monitored by iPharro Media, the German-based video fingerprinting firm spun off from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, known for its role in developing MP3 compression.

"We're looking for customers to be testers in the New York market," said iPharro CEO Joshua Cohen, reached at the NAB conference in Las Vegas, where the firm has taken a booth to shop its MediaSeeker Portal.

The MediaSeeker Portal detects specific content across multiple broadcast television channels simultaneously by storing up to hundreds of thousands of fingerprints--unique, readily identifiable characteristics--for quick on-demand comparison against live television streams.

"We see real demand in the media industry from customers looking to clarify when a specific piece of content is aired on a particular TV channel. Media buyers, for instance, want to keep track of their advertising bookings and ensure that the correct version of a commercial plays at exactly the time it was meant to air," Cohen said in an earlier statement.

"Our technology will give you the assurance that a commercial...is aired exactly as created, for its entire length, or whether - and what--modifications were made," he says.

iPharro said other potential customers for the Web-based service include PR agencies, media research firms, political consultants and in-house communications departments.

Competitors in the space include Nielsen SIGMA and TNS Broadcast Verification--but Bill Reynolds, vice president/director of media for Hill Holliday's Erwin-Penland, noted that iPharro's MediaSeeker could have "a significant advantage in speed and cost" because "it appears not to require pre-encoding the content before it is delivered to the media." He added, however, that success in the U.S. would depend, in part, on expansion to at least the top 50 TV markets--if not the top 100 or all markets.

Nielsen itself has been using the technology in Germany since 2006, according to iPharro.