In the past five years, watermarking has become a major topic to solve authentication problems and copyright protection as major security demands in digital marketplaces. A wide variety of watermarking techniques has been proposed in the literature. Most techniques are developed for still images; currently the research community enforces also approaches for other multimedia data like video, audio and 3D models.In our paper, we summarize the main watermarking parameters and introduce a media independent classification scheme. Our classification scheme is based on the application areas. We show the important parameters and possible attacks. Based on our proposed classification the quality of the watermarking techniques can be evaluated. Furthermore, we address the need for combining digital video and audio watermarking for media authentication.