The general setup of a fingerprinting system is depicted below. The two key components of a fingerprinting system are the fingerprint server and one or more fingerprint clients. There are two types of fingerprint clients:

- Ingestion clients: to ingest ‘reference’ fingerprints and associated metadata in the fingerprint database. Typically used by a content owner who wants to ingest reference fingerprints of their assets.

- Identification clients: to identify unknown content. An identification fingerprint client extracts fingerprints from audio and/or video content and sends them to the fingerprint server for identification. This is typically used by websites who want to identify content at the time of upload.

Both fingerprint identification and ingestion clients require a TCP/IP connection with the server and can be located anywhere, where a TCP/IP connection can be made to the server.