IBC 2008 – AMSTERDAM. Security company Verimatrix is extending its business area beyond broadband and IPTV to take in cable, satellite and DTT platforms.
Steve Christian, VP of marketing, said that with the market for pay-TV extending to the value of $1.2 billion over the next four or five years, the company wanted to expand outside of the IPTV space. “The approach is to use the sophisticated security technology in today’s chips that does a better job of securing the information you need than the smart card itself”. He argued that the smart card, which continues to be the CA method of choice for the vast majority of pay-TV operators, had vulnerabilities that left platforms open to attack. “It has been quite a bit of extra development at the client end, where the work has needed to be more sophisticated, and at the headend where we have a number of new server components.” One key addition is the inclusion of subscriber management systems that are handled separately in the IPTV environment.
Verimatrix intends to target systems in the Asian market that are currently running analogue networks, but will be upgrading to digital services, converting high end subscribers to enhanced services while maintaining basic level security at the lower end of the market.
The company describes itself as having five million screens protected, including licences that may not as yet been distributed to the end user, evenly split between Asia, the US and EMEA. The US is represented by smaller operators, while business in Europe and Asia is with larger operators, such as Sweden’s Telia.
Verimatrix has also reached agreement with the French DVB-CI specialist Neotion to carry its security over the new CI+ system being adopted in countries including Germany and The Netherlands. “Neotion has some very interesting security features into its silicon that enables us to support software based security on a CI card format. Most people will have CI cards inserted into the top of it, like a SIM card, but we can support both software-based content security and our forensic watermarking technology to enable a range of IDTV devices to receive secure pay-TV services using Vermatrix technology.”
As previously reported in Broadband TV News, the Neotion technology is also capable of converting MPEG-4 signals for display on MPEG-2 screens.
