The service, called MediaHedge, will be an online hosted offering for content providers. It marries Civolution's video fingerprinting technology with Gracenote’s music identification technology, hooking into Gracenote's Global Media Database. MediaHedge will enable content owners and service providers to identify content that is to be streamed or downloaded from their services, and will appeal particularly to service providers that allow user-generated content to be uploaded for consumption via their sites.

They will be able to apply pre-defined rules for managing that content based on how it matches against the audio-visual database. Content can be blocked before publication, for example, or users can be redirected to specific websites that display targeted advertisements before copyrighted content can be listened to or viewed.

Customers will also be able to refer to the content database, giving them more detailed information about files hosted on their service. Content owners will be able to register and store their own fingerprints and content metadata as part of the service, the companies said.

Monetizing their assets

“By integrating Gracenote's and Civolution’s market-leading identification technologies to create Mediahedge, we are able to offer content owners a complete solution for tracking, filtering, measuring and monetizing their assets", said William Schulze, director of business development for Gracenote.

Copyright infringements on web 2.0 services have been a source of controversy in the past. Viacom infamously sued Google over the use of the YouTube service to host content that it owned, for example.

Gracenote will be marketing and selling Mediahedge in North America and Japan, while Civolution will cover the European markets.