Access to premium sporting events is a major driver for Pay TV service adoption across the globe. The golden rule in Pay-TV is “if it is worth watching, it is worth paying for”, which highlights the need for secure content protection. Host nations such as South Korea and Australia experienced huge increases in the sale of personal TV handsets and flat-screen TVs during past World Cup and Olympics Games. With just months before the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and a few years prior to the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa, these major sporting events are expected to boost the global number of mobile TV subscribers and the demand for pay-TV services. Informa Telecoms & Media predicts that the potential global market for mobile broadcast TV will increase from 12.1 million in 2007 to 335.6 million subscribers by 2012. The Asia Pacific region is expected to be the leading region with 145.2 million subscribers by 2012 (Mobile TV: Broadcast Network Rollouts, Business Models and Handsets. 3rd Edition. Informa Telecoms & Media. Pg. 259).

In addition to being the leading market, the Asia Pacific region is also characterized by a fragmented market with regards to the deployed mobile broadcast technology. For example, Japan launched its ISDB-T mobile service named ‘1Seg’ in 2006 and is currently evaluating the potential of MediaFLO technology. Since 2005, South Korea has been operating two competing commercial mobile broadcast services over S-DMB and T-DMB networks. The satellite-based service (S-DMB) from TU Media has adopted a pay-TV approach and, as of August 2007, had over 1.25 million subscribers. The terrestrial and competing service (T-DMB) has been adopted by far more subscribers because the service is free. However, in order to improve the return-oninvestment, the service provider has decided to complete the revenues from advertisements with direct revenues from premium data services. This new offering will be protected with a Conditional Access (CA) system.

In China, a homegrown standard, named China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (CMMB) is currently being developed and may be introduced for the 2008 Olympics. In the mean time, a number of trials are already deployed in various regions (e.g. Shanghai, Guangdong, Beijing), taking advantage of existing DAB networks to broadcast premium encrypted data services to mobile devices. In other countries, DVB-H seems to be the leading technology. All have run trials to evaluate the technology as well as the market demand. Vietnam is the first country in the region to launch a DVB-H commercial service. The service was rolled out by Vietnam Television Corporation (VTC) at the end of 2006. MediaFLO was also evaluated in countries such as Malaysia and Taiwan, and DVBSH has raised strong interest in the region.

The excitement growing around mobile broadcast TV is due to two things: (1) Mobility, on handheld devices such as PMPs, PDAs and on laptops via USB dongles; and (2) Convergence, where the device is also a mobile phone. In some cases, the device is a mobile phone, PDA and PMP all at once. The question everyone is asking is this: What business models and content will result in a successful, profitable operation?

Whether or not mobile TV can fulfill the promise it shows is unknown. Will a free-to-air service driven by ad revenues work? Or will a 100% paid service be better?

If the service is completely free-to-air, how can advertising be presented in a way that does not detract from the user experience. Existing terrestrial broadcasters are experiencing a slow failure of the ad revenue model. Many viewers see ad interstitials as visual spam. Will mobile TV viewers be prepared to put up with it because the service is free? Or will they be annoyed, because the average watch time on mobile terminals is generally shorter than on a TV in the home?

If the service is paid, then what content do consumers want to watch enough to be willing to pay for it? The highest throughput mobile TV platforms allow an on operator to carry at best 30 TV channels, or a combination of TV, audio, and data services. The price of any offering clearly has to be at a utility or commodity level, with some upside for ultra-premium content such as high profile, mass audience sporting events, and first-release movies.

Perhaps the best thing an operator can do is to offer a combination of free-to-view and paid services.

If an operator chooses to offer paid services, there is yet another question to answer:

Which service protection solution should be used? There are those who espouse the use of completely open service protection standards. While we generally agree with the goals of using open standards, we are concerned that absolute and blind adherence to the principle of open standards could, in the long run, be detrimental to the long-term viability of mobile broadcast pay-TV operators. This is due to a fundamental mismatch between “open standards” and what a pay-TV operator needs in order to build and sustain a viable longterm business.

It is very important to keep in mind that mobile TV platforms will be used for mobile broadcast pay-TV services. The operators are not selling connections to a network; they are selling access to content being transported over the network. As such it is also very important that operators think like a pay-TV operator in the context of the pay-TV value chain, and that the needs of each entity in that value chain are fully understood.

Content owners:

• Want to protect the intellectual property inherent in their content assets, and to control the consumption of those assets so that they receive their rightful revenue.

• Must have trust in the delivery channels, where piracy is either non-existent or limited to lowlevel casual piracy.

Service providers:

• Want to protect the revenues that they get from delivering the content to consumers in order to reduce the cost-recovery period for their infrastructure investments.

• Must have trust in the delivery channels, where piracy is either non-existent or limited to lowlevel casual piracy.

• Want to maximize ARPU by being able to run different business models on the network (e.g., subscription, prepaid, payper- view, NVOD, pay-per-time, PVR, etc). In other words they want to give the consumers as many ways of spending money on the network as possible.

Consumers:

• Want choice of content, and flexibility in the way they consume that content.

• Will be unhappy paying for content that is accessible to unauthorized people, and will actively look for ways to avoid paying for that content.

Clearly, the value chain needs a secure, trusted, and auditable means of ensuring that payment is received in return for the consumption of broadcasting program rights. In other words, access to certain programming is made conditional upon payment for the consumed content. The underlying implication is that commercial-scale piracy would be a disaster for the pay-TV value chain.

The success of a pay-TV operation therefore depends on the satisfaction of the following factors:

• Quality content is offered at reasonable prices.

• Multiple business models are used to induce the consumers to spend money on the network.

• Piracy is either negligible or non-existent.

• The CAS is auditable, secure and renewable.

• There is support from the CA vendor support for proactive antipiracy measures. This includes on-going world-wide surveillance of piracy forums, web sites, and outlets; and the ability to support the pay-TV operator with forensic analysis in piracy prosecutions.

• There is strong legislative support for IPR protection, and the will on the part of local and National governments to enforce anti-piracy laws.

But what if the pay-TV operator is experiencing significant levels of piracy? Satisfaction of the following factors then becomes paramount:

• There must be only one party (usually the CAS vendor) to which the pay-TV operator turns for help in combating the piracy. This party must have end-to end ownership of the security solution. Typically, this means that at least the key management system is proprietary to the CAS vendor, and there are proprietary security components in the headend and in the terminal.

• There must be effective, timely countermeasures. The CAS vendor must have a clear set of countermeasures that can be run against an attack, and as quickly as possible.

• All countermeasures must be unilateral, i.e., they must not require cooperation from the consumer to be effective. This is important because the pay-TV operator cannot, and must not, rely on the goodwill or honesty of the consumer to either return the terminal or download a patch to have the security hole closed.

• If the security fix involves patches to the secure component in the terminal, it must be possible to apply security patches unilaterally over-the-air.

Without these the entire business is at risk.

Open standards are a good thing. For example, the Open Mobile Alliance was formed in June 2002 with the objective of delivering a sort of mobile telephony Utopia in which:

• Consumers and business users will receive seamless interoperable services regardless of their device, network type, operator or geographical location.

• Content, application and service providers will provide users around the world easy access to information and transactions, anywhere, anytime resulting in timely and financial efficiencies.

• Wireless Vendors can easily achieve interoperability with other vendors’ products, and reduce R&D costs.

• IT companies can leverage existing investments to reach mobile users.

• Mobile Operators will enjoy increasing data ARPU through increasing use of mobile services.

However, in the context of a pay TV operation, completely open standards introduce a level of risk that may not be acceptable to all operators. This is because completely open standards do not address the business and piracy management issues raised earlier.

• A fully standardized key management layer means that there is no end-to-end security ownership. An operator can buy the key management server from one vendor, and the terminal vendors can either do their own client-side implementations or else source it from a third party. If the system has been hacked multiple parties on the server-side and clientside have to be coordinated in order to identify the hack and work out fixes. Who is to be held responsible and accountable for fixing the breach?

• If one device is hacked all devices are at risk, even if the hack is in a different country or happens with another operator. Although the keys of a specific terminal can be revoked, the problem is that if one terminal has been hacked then the operator must assume that all units of that make and model of terminal will eventually be hacked.

• There are no fallbacks or quick fixes for security issues if the open standard provides no means for replacing or refreshing the security elements in the terminal.

• The open standards based service protection solutions have not been exposed to any concerted, high-grade attacks. This lack of exposure means that security flaws will almost certainly be discovered. The open standards specifications are complex. Although a lot of time has been spent in workgroups and interoperability test fests to remove unclear or ambiguous semantics, there is no certainty that the specifications are problem-free.

• If it is clear that service protection solution has been compromised beyond recovery, the operator cannot easily switch to an alternative service protection solution. To so would require wholesale replacement of the headend security components as well as complete swap-outs of the existing terminal population.

Service protections solutions such as DVB-CBMS’ Open Security Framework (OSF) addresses these concerns by specifying a security solution that is open and standardised, but allows the vital key management layer to be selected by the operator. Although this approach has its drawbacks it does provide an operator with recourse in the event of a security breach.

It is a model that has been tried and tested in the digital pay TV industry. DVB OSF is modeled on the predominant DVB digital TV standards. In the latter, the presence of proprietary key management layers in an otherwise open platform has not stopped the cost of settop boxes from decreasing in cost. In the early days of the digital pay TV industry standard definition set-top boxes used to cost about USD500. The unit cost of a set-top box declined steadily as the industry matured and volumes rose. Today, the unit cost a standard definition set-top box can be as low as USD80.

In conclusion, to successfully run mobile TV services, operators need to understand consumer behavior. Unlike digital TV, churn on mobile TV is very high. One operator has seen churn peak at 10% per month. Constant monitoring of consumer behavior is essential. A true consumers’ value proposition includes content, relevant services, positive user experience (easy to use and easy to pay), good value for money and straightforward pricing. Business factors, such as subscription models, cooperation along the value chain are vital, as is a viable business model that is acceptable to all parties in the value chain. Last but not least is the challenge of providing a high quality of service at costs that are low enough for a profitable value chain. The “anytime, anywhere” mobile TV experience is possible only if network coverage extends everywhere, including in subways and indoors.

Add A Comment

  Post A Comment

There are no comments for the article yet.

Rate This Article

Excellent
Very Good
Good
Quite Good
Poor

  Rate This Article

Related Stories

No related articles at the moment.