Nielsen announced today that it has developed a new service that will let media companies police the distribution of video content on sites like YouTube.

The new service combines digital watermarking and fingerprinting to help producers track where their content resides on the Internet.

“We are in a unique position to a offer a comprehensive, practical solution,” said Nielsen’s Dave Harkness. “The problem that other companies have is that they need the content ahead of time [to implement their tracking]. For Nielsen, that’s no problem at all.”

Nielsen automatically accesses the majority of TV content before it airs, and already implements both fingerprinting and watermarking to allow for content tracking.