In an attempt to put an end to unauthorized uploading of videos on the internet, Nielsen announced a new media service designed to monitor the flux of media content, starting with mid-2008.

Tensions between the owners of the contents released on the internet and the tech companies that allow it have been making headlines for some time now. The year 2007 brought Google a $1 billion suit for copyright violation from Viacom. Hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded daily on Google’s YouTube, but Google has just recently started testing fingerprinting the contents. Some media companies have not been satisfied though by Google’s methods of taking down the videos that break copyright laws, saying that they should not be uploaded at all.

The Nielsen Digital Media Manager is meant to be the ultimate filtering technology, capable of keeping track of the media content uploaded daily on the internet, by using digital watermarking and fingerprinting. The new program will have a wide database that will check the rules set by the producer of the clip for video-distribution.

Nielsen’s solution seems to have appeared somewhat late, as many of the customers have already been signed up by its rivals. In spite of all that, Nielsen is confident in this new service and says that he has already approached Google and News Corp.’s Fox for collaboration.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Rick Cotton, the executive vice-president and general counsel of NBC Universal welcomes Nielsen’s initiative: “The point is the big boys are coming, and that signals that this is a field that has reached technological maturity […] It will achieve widespread commercial adoption, and from a content point of view, it will contribute dramatically to reducing the easy theft of copyrighted material online."

Nielsen won’t stop here though. The plan for the year to come goes beyond the internet, offering the same type of service for DVDs, videogames and music.