Verimatrix gives studios another reason to offer movies earlier to homes

San Diego-based Verimatrix announced a watermarking technology that studios could use to help combat piracy on streamed movies, potentially encouraging them to offer more early-release films.

The watermarks won't make the offer more appealing to consumers or the studios' other distribution partners, though, and those hurdles are at least as big for the early releases as the technological limitations. The Federal Communications Commission's decision allowed pay-TV services to offer early-release movies only through encrypted digital outputs on their set-top boxes. Although that restriction rendered the films inaccessible to viewers with older TV sets equipped only with analog or unencrypted digital inputs, it also deterred viewers from recording and sharing the films online. That deterrent was a prerequisite for studios to make movies available in high definition as little as two months after they had appeared in theaters.