The Nielsen Company and Digimarc announced a new service, called Nielsen Digital Media Manager, for monitoring and managing the distribution of media content across the Internet. The initial focus will be on the distribution of TV programming, but it can be expanded to other data types.

The tools, based on Digimarc’s watermarking technology, are designed to help content owners monitor and protect copyrighted material. Nielsen said it already uses digital watermarking to encode 95 percent of national TV programming for its ratings service.

The companies expect the new solution to be available in mid-2008. They said their plan is to convince content providers to digitally watermark DVDs, movies, music, video games and other content in subsequent phases of the rollout of the new media identification and management services.

“We believe these services will stimulate the growth of online video distribution to the benefit of consumers, content providers and distributors,” said David Calhoun, chairman and CEO of Nielsen.

“Until now, the lack of an independent, industry-accepted identification and tracking service has limited the transactions that allow the delivery of media content over the Internet. Now with our new media identification and management services’ unique ability to identify content throughout the Internet, both content providers and distributors can protect and monetize the value of online media.”