Digital pay-TV platforms are growing in countries such as India, Taiwan and China. Value-added services have been introduced in established markets like Australia and New Zealand. Korea is leading the region in adopting new technologies and Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) is starting to make its mark.

All this is creating exciting opportunities for digital TV solutions providers in the Asia Pacific. "We see significant growth potential for all markets in the region," says Sue Taylor, vice-president and general manager, NDS Asia-Pacific.

Andy Mathieson, director of Belfast-based Latens forecasts, "The aggregated Asia Pacific CA market is certain to grow in the short and medium term, for reasons such as the launch of new services, content companies mandating CA, and regulatory pressure. I also believe that the CA developments we're pioneering in terms of cost of ownership and ease of provisioning will help the CA market grow throughout the region."

Another CAS solutions provider, Conax, sees a trend where startup operators base their business models on a `walk-before-you-run' approach i.e., initially providing subscription TV services and later adding features such as video-on-demand. The complexity of the systems and support organizations required to run a pay-TV business are better understood now than a few years back.

Lower costs another spur

"The cost for user devices (STB) is dropping and a new generation of DVB chipsets will continue the process of integration and reduction of production costs," says Hans Kwaaitaal, vice-president Asia Pacific, Conax. "This results in lower cost per user, enabling faster take-up of pay TV subscribers. Also, various governments are promoting standardization; for example, the Philippine government just announced the adoption of DVBT standard for digital terrestrial television. The Chinese government is actively promoting pay TV usage and India, too, has set a deadline for implementation of conditional access system," says Kwaaital.

NDS acknowledges that new technologies are being ramped up across the region, subject to the regulatory conditions.

"The less developed markets hasten the rollout of new technologies and products compared to the more established markets," says Taylor. "In most markets this is due to competition and in some, due to regulation, or both. Rolling out new services and features based on new technologies provides a differentiator compared to competitors' platforms and adds value to the consumer's experience, creating additional revenue opportunities when fully integrated with the capabilities of the conditional access or DRM. Such integration is what NDS excels at," says Taylor.

Latens initially catered for the IPTV market, which is taking off slowly in most Asian countries, However Mathieson points out that the launch of his company's BCAS (Broadcast Conditional Access System) means "we are the only company that can offer software CA for both digital satellite and for cable networks transitioning to digital, and crucially we can do this cost-effectively."

He adds, "We anticipate increasing CA uptake in all markets where ARPU average revenue per user) and local communication infrastructure don't easily support the cost and provisioning difficulties of the smartcard. We believe that this trend will next move into the cable and satellite worlds and it may be that Asia Pacific leads the way with this next trend."

On how the challenges differ for CAS versus DRM provision in the region, NDS's Taylor says the different customer bases represent a challenge as, typically, neither is a broadcast platform operator and both are typically telcos. This requires a change of mindset and terminology on both sides, usually as a result of cross-education.

"NDS needs to learn the specifics and technical characteristics of a particular mobile or IP delivery network while it needs to convey some of the lessons it has learnt from the broadcast world about protection of content, suitable user interfaces and electronic program guides for quick and easy content selection," she says.

Taylor points to the Korean and Indian markets as NDS's most notable successes in the region: "Korea is the most technologically advanced digital market in Asia, with more types of digital broadcast platform active than any other country: satellite, cable, terrestrial, IPTV, satellite mobile and terrestrial mobile platforms, with advanced services including high definition, PVR and so on. NDS is the conditional access provider to the SkyLife direct-to-home platform as well as to most of the MSOs. NDS has a significant presence in Korea, with sales and marketing, operations and research and development teams based in Seoul."

And after years of hard work and false starts, the Indian CAS market has begun to grow significantly. "In India, this (acceleration of basic digital rollout) is expected to shape up due to both increasing competition from DTH operators for the established cable multi-system operators and the legislative and regulatory pressure to launch CAS," Taylor says. "The launch of Tata- Sky's direct-to-home satellite service has raised the bar for its competitors in providing choice, control and convenience for its customers. At the time of writing, Tata-Sky's subscriber base had reached 250,000, just three and a half months after launch."

For Tata-Sky's DTH platform, NDS provided its full complement of broadcast pay TV services including conditional access, middleware, electronic program guide and interactive applications.

"Competitive pay TV is now a reality across India, with citizens in most – even relatively remote - rural areas at least having a choice of two DTH platforms, and those in the urban areas having a choice of one or more cable platforms as well. DTH competition has spurred the cable market, where Hathway has extended its early lead in digitalization of its networks. Hathway also uses NDS's conditional access, middleware and EPG technologies. As with Korea, but on a larger scale, NDS has sales and marketing, operations and research and development teams based in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. NDS now has almost 600 staff in India, since opening its first office in 2000," adds Taylor.

Taylor points out, just like India, China has begun significant adoption of CAS and related technologies. And she predicts these systems will soon be introduced in Pakistan and Vietnam.

Describing how CAS and DRM technologies have evolved to meet the needs of IPTV and TV via mobile, Kwaaitaal says, "Smartcard based, replaceable security has a long and proven track record. It is interesting to see that telecom operators with experience in digital TV tend to select smartcard-based CA for their IPTV services. An increasing number of operators realize that TV will be provided in broadcast mode for a long time."

This suggests operators are choosing hardware-based security for broadcast services. Also, it's relatively easy to re-use the hardware security for DRM solutions. So instead of introducing a less secure DRM solution, these services adopt the high security level used for broadcast.

According to Kwaaitaal, the main advantage of CAS is the wide availability of user devices and standardization of head-end equipment, plus the fact that the business models are established and easy to grasp. "DRM is not standardized, neither with regard to requirements nor through implementation and there are quite some challenges in creating a business model for DRM," he says.

Taylor notes, "CAS functionality – even in the traditional broadcast domain - has evolved and expanded from simply enabling or disabling access to content delivered to the home, to also protecting the content and preserving its usage rights (e.g. to move, copy, store content). The easiest example by which to demonstrate this is the PVR – or indeed any device, which allows for storage of paid-for TV content. Not only does NDS's VideoGuard CA protect the content as delivered to the home by whatever means, but it also protects the content while it is stored on the hard disk. If it did not protect content in this way, it would be trivial to redistribute paid-for content from a single PVR."

"For many IPTV and some mobile content delivery platforms (e.g. over 3G networks), point-to-point or unicast delivery of content is provided in place of or better in addition to broadcast (or multicast) delivery. Unicast delivery allows business models such as video on- demand, which requires a different approach to and solution for content and rights protection. In the broadcast domain, the content is scrambled live, once and for all and the key, which unlocks it is encrypted live, once and for all. The system scales easily to millions of subscribers."

"In the traditional broadcast world, with traditional CAS, rights and content is generally handled together, simultaneously. Thus for example a program is broadcast and at the same time via the same broadcast channel, the entitlements which determine who can access it are also broadcast. In the DRM paradigm, rights are handled separately from content and the two may be delivered over different channels or at different times. This allows content to be delivered once to a device by one means, and rights to be delivered either with that content or separately at a later time."

This separation allows for efficient "super-distribution" models, where a platform operator allows subscribers to forward content to their friends, but with limited preview rights or maybe no viewing rights.

"If the friends wish to view the content, they must in this case request the rights to be delivered to them – usually for a fee. But they do not need to download the content gain, saving time, resources and of course money," says Taylor. "Another model it enables is the simple video rental model. Content is downloaded with viewing only rights, which expire after (say) three days. After the three days, the renter may be given the option to purchase the content for permanent use (as per a DVD) or maybe to extend the rental. If the renter decides to take either option, only the new rights / entitlements need to be delivered to the user, not the whole program. This represents a massive saving of bandwidth and other resources, not to mention money."

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