• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, December 6, 2007 10:32 AM

Nielsen Media built its empire as an arbiter of the media world, providing neutral third-party data for buyers and sellers of advertising. Now, in a partnership with the digital watermarking company Digimarc, it aims to referee the controversial world of online video through a new service that controls how copyrighted video is distributed on the Web.

Customers of the new service would be traditional media giants like NBC Universal and Disney, social networks like Facebook and video sharing sites like YouTube. Each has a different stake in online video: content producers like NBC want control over their copy protected materials, while social media sites have drawn traffic by allowing users to upload content, including copyrighted video. The tensions between the two sides have been simmering for years; advertisers, hope that better privacy enforcement would make online video sites a safer place to buy ads.

Which is precisely where Nielsen's digital Media Manager comes in. When users want to upload copyrighted video to a site, Nielsen's technology first identifies the clip and then checks its database for copy protection rules. The clip may or may not be allowed to load, or it might require an ad to be served along with it. As yet, Nielsen doesn't have any partners for Digital Media Manager, which launches in the spring.

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