The container technology developed at Fraunhofer SIT is an efficient solution for individually marking large amounts of media data (transactional watermarking). This is used for example by online shops to mark downloaded data with information about the purchase or the buyer.

The watermarking embedding process is divided into two phases: First the total amount of information to be embedded, the secret key and other parameters are defined. Then the original data is converted into the container format. To create an individually marked file, only the information to be actually embedded is then necessary. Performance (on current off-the-shelf PCs) is roughly twenty times real-time for CD production and even 500 to 1000 times real-time for the creation of mp3 files.