the present invention relates generally to digital watermarking and steganographic data hiding . in one embodiment a method of rendering content to a user is provided . the rendered content includes a digital watermark embedded therein . in another embodiment , digital watermarking is utilized to facilitate purchase or lease of audio or video content over a network or with a remote computer . in still another embodiment , a compression characteristic is determined , and subsequent steganographic embedding is influenced based on the characteristic . other embodiments are provided as well .