Market trends
The shipments of integrated Digital TV receivers are continuously increasing. According to Strategy Analytics, the installed base is expected to reach 453 millions units worldwide by end of 2012.
Integrated Digital TVs is a particularly promising area. As these screens include a smart card slot, they present advantages for both end users and operators.
Hence, pay TV operators have a window of opportunity to increase their addressable market and generate increased revenue streams if they also deliver their content to integrated DTV receivers (iDTVs).
Security remains a key challenge in providing authorised access to scrambled TV content, including when it is delivered to iDTVs. At stake for the operators are the protection of their revenues and compliancy with their rights holder requirements.
To ensure the highest security against piracy, pay-TV operators must deliver their content to iDTVs that are compliant with the CI+ specifications.. CI+ adds security and features to the proven DVB Common Interface (CI) standard generally implemented in the Conditional Access Modules (CAMs). CI+ enables end to end security between the CAM and the TV set.
CI+ specifications and DVB-CI standard are interoperable and lead therefore to compatibility between CI+ and DVB-CI devices (TV sets, CAMs).
CI+ compliant TV sets can access to a wide range of pay-TV services such as Pay Per View or Video on demand. In addition, when the CAM and the TV set are both CI+ compliant, the viewer can use interactive applications such as T-commerce, voting, gaming etc.
The Viaccess solution
Viaccess fully support the CI+ initiative. Viaccess’ solution encrypts live TV and on demand content between the CAM and the hosting device (TV set or set top box). This is done thanks to a CI+ compliant browser in the TV set and a Viaccess application embedded in the CAM. The content is made clear once both the CAM and the hosting device have authenticated.
Viaccess CI+ key features
Viaccess’ solution relies on its latest state-of-the-art smart card technology: the PC5 card. To maximise protection against piracy and hacking, Viaccess is committed to developing a new generation of smart card every 24 months, based on state of the art chipset certified EAL5+.
Viaccess works together with its partners (Neotion, SMIT) to provide pay-TV broadcasters with a large range of Viaccess certified CAMs; all of them are fully compliant with the DVB-CI standard and are being upgraded to CI+. These CAMs support MPEG-2, MPEG-4/H.264, SD and HD signals.
