NEC has announced today that its video content identification technology will be supported in the upcoming MPEG-7 video standard, meaning content owners that release videos with the standard can "detect illegal copies" uploaded to the Internet almost instantly.

The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video.

NEC says "these developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment."

Among the features of the video content identification technology are:

Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.

A high detection rate and low false positive rate for all video contents
By estimating confidence of signatures generated from each frame and using the confidence for sequence identification, the technology achieves a high detection rate (*6) with a very low false positive rate (*7). These technologies achieved an average detection rate of 96% at a very low false alarm rate of 5ppm (5 in one million) through tests conducted by the international standardization organization.

Detection of short video scenes
Due to the high identification capability of signatures, the technology is capable of accurately detecting video scenes as short as 2 seconds (60 frames), which was formerly impossible when using conventional methods.

Compatibility with home PCs
By designing a compact signature size of 76 bytes per frame, the storage memory required for the matching process is minimized. As a result, a home-class PC (*8) can match approximately 1,000 hours of video in 1 second. Due to the proliferation of video distribution services on the Internet, the detection and deletion of illegally distributed and copied video content (copyright infringement) has become a crucial issue for content holders and service providers. This problem has conventionally been addressed by manual inspection which is incapable of accurately tracking the constantly growing volume of Internet content. In order to solve this issue, various automatic detection tools have been proposed, such as digital watermarks where content is embedded with special code, and the use of image retrieval technology. However, it was prohibitively difficult to accurately inspect large databases, short content or video produced through various editing operations. These new technologies resolve each of the above issues.

The tech was approved in late April, and will be officially published sometime during September.

NEC plans to demo the tech this week.

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The creator of the extremely popular show American Idol, Simon Fuller, has seen his roster of artists hit a new iTunes milestone, 160 million songs downloaded.

Fuller's artist management company 19 Entertainment said some of the more famous artists in the group are idol winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and former and present British singers The Spice Girls and Annie Lennox.

"He is without question the biggest manager of the digital age," says Fred Bronson, author of "The Billboard Book of Number One Hits."

Fuller had teamed up with iTunes right at the start, in 2003 when legal digital music was still in its infancy. "I felt there was a real synergy with what I do, which is launching new artists and TV shows, and what iTunes does, which is to sell music in an immediate and interactive way," Fuller added via Reuters.

Industry trade group IFPI says physical music sales (such as CDs) have fallen 12.7 percent year-on-year, while digital music sales continued to grow, 9.2 percent this year, and a 1000 percent gain since 2004.

Additionally, Fuller says: "The future is all about how the digital and the physical worlds can co-exist. I think music in the long term is going to be just fine. But in the short term, as we see, (it's) bedlam and chaos. We have to reinvent, in music, TV and movies, that interaction between the consumer and the content we create."

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Engadget has reported today that Apple and AT&T originally signed a five-year exclusivity pact in 2007 with the launch of the original iPhone, although it is unclear whether that deal is still in effect, just three years later.

The site found the official details out after reading a 2008 court filing by Apple, although a USAToday report made it clear in 2007 that AT&T was the exclusive distributor of the phone in the United States. Verizon also passed on the original deal.

The filing was necessary because Apple and AT&T were the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2007, which claimed that the carrier had a monopoly over iPhone customers, since after their contract expired, they could not jump to another carrier, as the handset was locked down.

Nilay Patel of Engadget says the real question may be whether the deal is still in effect, or been reworked since 2008: "Contracts can be canceled, amended, and breached in many ways, and AT&T's spotty recent service history plus the explosion of the iPhone and the mobile market in general have given Apple any number of reasons to revisit the deal. In addition, the two companies obviously hit the negotiating table again to hammer out the iPad's pricing plans, and there's no way of knowing whether that deal involves the iPhone as well."

It will be interesting to see whether or not an iPhone for Verizon or any other carrier is on the way sometime this year, or if that 2012 deal is still in effect.

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According to the latest NPD figures, the Android operating system has finally overtaken the iPhone for the number two spot in the U.S. smartphone market share, taking 28 percent in the latest quarter.

RIM's BlackBerry OS remains the clear leader at 36 percent, with the iPhone OS in third place at 21 percent for the Q1 2010.

"As in the past, carrier distribution and promotion have played a crucial role in determining smartphone market share," adds Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD. "In order to compete with the iPhone, Verizon Wireless has expanded its buy-one-get-one offer beyond RIM devices to now include all of their smartphones."

Some of the prominent phones to be used in the BOGO promotions were the Motorola Droid and the BlackBerry Curve, both strong sellers.

Overall, AT&T subscribers accounted for 32 percent of all smartphone sales with Verizon close behind at 30 percent.

Adds Rubin: "Recent previews of BlackBerry 6, the recently announced acquisition of Palm by HP, and the pending release of Windows Phone 7 demonstrates the industry's willingness to make investments to address consumer demand for smartphones and other mobile devices. Carriers continue to offer attractive pricing for devices, but will need to present other data-plan options to attract more customers in the future."

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Vodafone, Orange and O2 have all priced their iPad 3G data plans, with each offering micro-SIM cards, now.

O2 offers the following price tiers:

500MB per day- £2.00
1GB per month- £10.00
3GB per month- £15.00

Orange offers the following pricing:

200MB per day- £2.00
1GB per week- £7.50
3GB per month- £15.00
10GB per month- £25.00

Vodafone is the only to offer unlimited, and offers the following:

1GB per month- £10.00
Unlimited per month- £25.00

Additionally, Orange and O2 offer unlimited Wi-Fi through "BT Openzone" hotspots.

The iPad will go on sale in the UK on May 28th and will cost £429 for the basic model (Wi-Fi, 16GB) and £699 for the 3G/Wi-Fi/64GB model.

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Nokia, which announced two months ago it was beginning a "Design by Community" project to create a new phone, has said this week that the project is almost completed, with fans finishing voting on what they want the most in the new smartphone device.

By the end of the month, Nokia designers will have turned out some mockups of the upcoming device.

UnwiredView says fans voted and decided that the phone would be the following: "10mm thin monoblock made out of aluminum. Its features should include: a 4 inch capacitive touchscreen display, open source operating system, unlimited multitasking, Wi-Fi 802.11 n/b/g, USB 3.0, HDMI, Dolby surround sound, and an 8MP camera with 4X optical zoom, dual LED and Xenon flash, and HD video recording."

The smartphone should also have "DbC OS 1 temperature and location sensors" which would monitor your local conditions at all times.

The device is expected to include multiple OS support as well, likely with Symbian^4 and MeeGo.

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Twitter users, especially those that had gained a large following over the years, were shocked earlier today when their number of followers was reset to 0.

While the numbers were back to normal soon, the reset had to be done to kill off a bug that was being exploited to force celebrities to "follow" anybody who was using the bug.

"We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to "force" other users to follow them. We're now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place," said the company in a blog post.

Fortunately, adds the company, the glitch did not make private tweets public.

The extremely easy glitch involved tweeting the term "accept (whoever)" and then refreshing. Suddenly, Ashton Kutcher or whoever else you wanted was your fan.

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UK citizen Paul Chambers has been convicted this week of sending a 'menacing' tweet via Twitter, with the British Court fining him £1000 and slapping him with a criminal record.

In early January, the airport in South Yorkshire was closed due to excessive snow and Chambers was so mad that he wrote: "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

Airport security officials saw the tweet and then passed on the complaint to the local authorities.

Chambers lost his job after being arrested, and appears to be the first person to ever be convicted of a crime just for tweeting.

Although the tweet was a joke, the Doncaster Magistrates' Court found Chambers guilty of sending threatening messages and therefore imposed the steep fine.

Chambers says he is considering an appeal, as the criminal record jeopardizes his chances of securing a new job.

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