Stealth MediaLabs, Inc. announced on March 18th, that SunnComm Technologies Inc. has agreed to license "StealthChannel" proprietary technology, designed to utilize a hidden and virtually indestructible "metaspace" within compact discs and all forms of digitized audio. In addition to delivering persistent watermarking for SunnComm´s MediaMax music CD releases, StealthChannel will also enable delivery of new, MTV-like multimedia and e-commerce features, permanently embedded into music and movies. The StealthChannel is designed to survive digital and analog copying when content ends up on the Web or is dropped into portable media. Read more... University of Miami researchers have developed the new technology to embed a digital watermark into audio files that could prevent illegal duplication and piracy over the Internet. The innovation is based on a new principle in how stereo sound is created and perceived by the listener. Stereo sound operates on two channels; by altering the timing relationship between those two channels, researchers were able to create a third "masked'' channel through which new, inaudible information can be transmitted. The new information could be anything from pictures to text to links to websites. It could also include new computer programs that would prevent the information being copied or track illegal users. None of the added information would affect the actual sound of the files. "By adding StealthChannel multimedia metadata embedding technology to MediaMax, a significant new hidden channel of binary data can be encoded into the audio tracks of music and movies," stated Stealth MediaLabs president Howard Leventhal. "This auxiliary channel is inaudible and persists through transcoding and re-recording between analog and digital domains. The hidden signal maintains an extraordinary resistance to filtering. This capability also makes it possible to insert an unlimited array of supplementary digital files into most kinds of distributed audio. Valuable digital objects like embedded text, Java applets, Active X components, XML commands, pictures, scrolling music lyrics, e-commerce merchandise offers and hidden free samples of music, all can be permanently distributed in music utilizing the StealthChannel. Applying a breakthrough algorithm, these embedded objects are encoded at the extremely high rate of 20 kilobits per second, while impacting the file size of most kinds of high quality digital audio, minimally or not at all." SunnComm is currently testing its MediaMax technology with a majority of the world´s record companies. MediaMax was chosen to enhance and protect the newly discovered, historic Ike and Tina Turner compilation, "The Early Sessions", slated soon for worldwide release by Sterling Entertainment, a division of UAV Corporation.