Digital TV Europe July/August 2010
Cover story > Content Security
avoid the same thing happening to premium content. Many in the industry are confident that people will be willing to pay for online and mobile video services if the content is premium and of high enough quality. To date, however, pay-TV operators have generally struggled to deliver successful three-screen services. The reasons are many, but nearly all come down to issues of securi- ty. Hollywood studios are reluctant to hand over premium content for online or mobile distribution for fear of it being pirated, the result being that operators are unable to charge for services that are lacking in the same quality content as their TV offerings. To this end, security specialists are working to enable a similar level of security offered in set-top boxes on different devices. Andrew Wajs, chief technology officer at security provider Irdeto, sees a window of opportuni- ty for online services in particular. “In terms of multi-screen strategies, the PC is clearly the first screen [after the TV] that needs to be embraced by pay-TV operators. You have OTT suppliers coming onto the market and showing levels of success that incumbent operators want a part of. The magic through- put seems to be 10Mbps – that starts bring- ing the viability of good quality downloading of video or even streaming of video to the home. As soon as you start hitting that quali- ty of throughput, the movies start to come.” However, once at this stage, security begins to take centre stage. Hollywood studios do not see the PC as having the same level of securi- ty as that found in set-tops. “The big issue is what quality of video and what release win- dows will be allowed by the studios for PC delivery,” says Wajs. “Over-the-top and cable operators are vying for a mechanism to try and get content as early as possible and at as high a quality as possible as a means of differ- entiating themselves. Within that lies a secu- rity challenge that will have to be overcome.”
Security challenges
Viaccess has experience with three-screen deployments, having powered the launch of Orange’s Cinema Series, which offers film channels via TV, PC and mobile phone in
NDS (left) and Nagravision (right) have developed various solutions to enable the delivery of content to mulitple devices.
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France. “Three-screen strategies are already a reality as far as we’re concerned,” says Noureddine Hamdane, executive vice-presi- dent strategy and communications for Viaccess. “A meaningful three-screen strategy by a service provider is one that allows the end user to use any device to select or order content, and then watch or record on any device authorised by the service providers, anywhere without having to think about the network, the platform, or whatever,” he says. “A meaningful three-screen strategy by a technology vendor like Viaccess is one that allows the service providers to enable such an end-user cross-device experience without having to deal with a silo implementation.” Viaccess’ Flexible rights management solu- tion enables operators to roll out multi-DRM services to provide what Hamdane describes as a “simple and flexible” content purchase and usage experience. Traditional conditional-access security measures involving the placing of smartcards into set-top boxes are still regarded as the most secure by many, despite the develop- ment and improvement of software options. However, security vendors have had to devel- op their services to enable delivery to other devices. After all, “A smartcard won’t fit into a mobile or a PC,” says NDS’s senior product marketing manager, Howard Silverman. “There are clearly different security imple- mentations that need to be done on different devices. OTT has different challenges, for example, because it’s a more open environ- ment so the security challenges are greater
than in a closed set-top environment where we define much more closely the design to ensure that it can’t be broken.”
NDS has developed a multi-device DRM approach using its VideoGuard platform whereby it develops its DRM technology to service different types of devices on the client side and on the headend side. “Our Unified Headend supports multiple devices within the same headend,” says Silverman. “We’re trying to provide our operators with an abstraction layer that leaves the business rules and workflows associated with DRM unified such that you can build a business scenario and have a system take care of exact- ly how to get the particular rights and to pro- tect the content to the end device.” As Silverman points out, the number of devices that an operator could potentially support will always grow, which means they’re likely to “focus on markets where there’s high pene- tration of particular devices”. They will either take a standards-based approach to those client devices or they’ll implement security and/or user interfaces depending on the capabilities of the devices and the extent to which they want to reach their brands into each device, he says: “For a certain class of device they’ll use a more standards-based approach to protecting or encrypting the con- tent. For others that are more central to their business strategy, they’ll integrate more of the vertical market than they would in a standard device.”
Latens’ chief technology officer Jason Roger agrees that content providers are likely
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