Vobile, one of several companies hoping to help content producers crack down on copyright infringement in video, has raised $7 million more in financing.
We previously wrote about the Silicon Valley company here, when Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu invested. The latest round was led by Steamboat Ventures (a venture firm affiliated with Disney) and undisclosed individuals, and was first reported today by VentureWire.
The video identification field is getting increasingly sophisticated, and it needs to be. Many videos are ripped and converted into the grainy format of YouTube, and then mixed with music so that they’re hard to track. A new company Eyealike launched at the DEMO conference last month (see our coverage), saying it can pinpoint with 95 percent accuracy whether an image is copyrighted material or not — using frame-by-frame analysis of the movement of objects within the footage. It says this is more effective than relying solely on image or facial recognition, which it says companies like Vobile do. Google is also testing its own product to use with video identification for its YouTube subsidiary. Other players in include the venture-backed Gracenote, and Viewdle (though Viewdle is more focused on facial recognition for indexing purposes, rather than copyright identification purposes).
The Santa Clara, Calif. Vobile has now raised at least $10 million. The company was founded three years ago, and includes among its backers angel investor Jarl Mohn, former chief executive of Liberty Digital and others.
