Phil Cardy, product marketing director at Latens, says that conditional access can play its part in the burgeoning hybrid IPTV networks.

Throughout the DRM industry you have conditional access that will service one-way broadcast devices over cable, DTH or DTT, which have something embedded in the box, or typically a smart card. Then you have the other world that is IPTV, where you have two-way boxes, and more and more you’re seeing those in cable. While many Western European cable operators are already making a good business out of digital, many more are stuck in a conundrum. They want to go digital, but are not sure if they should go for a zapper box and just get everything digital from the start, or if they should try to upgrade their network to be completely two-way, backed by an interactive middleware. Then there is the option of DOCSIS 3 or some other technology that enables them to use IPTV over their cable systems. Generally operators have a spread of subscribers, some of which are not going to want to pay for expensive two-way set-top boxes, and others who would be very unhappy to have a simple zapper. There are still a lot of operators that have a large analogue base, with markets in Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Latin America and North America, each with their own issues. A primary market for Latens is operators that want to migrate to digital services and we’ve been working with some of these operators in the US. They are looking to put in small DTA (digital television adaptor) boxes so they can reclaim bandwidth on their 750MHz networks, replacing analogue channels with a full 300-channel line-up that includes HD. They also want it to be secure, so that they can tier all of their boxes with their entitlements in band over the network. As DOCSIS is rolled out they may also be able to introduce a bundled service to their customers.

Pre-installation
Another model is to roll out the advanced boxes ahead of time, so that when the operator is ready to deploy the service, the equipment is already installed at the customers’ premises. We saw a change last fall when Cox and Comcast, and even Cablelabs, said they thought IPTV was the future. It was also another means to break away from the SA-Motorola technology duopoly that is looking increasingly fragile. It is difficult to say if IPTV is more secure, but with the two-way element you have a really easy way to replace conditional access and actually switch conditional access on the set-top box, which is an excellent advantage for not being tied to a card-based system. We can also have detection mechanisms that see when people are trying to hack in on the network. This feedback path is simply not available on a one-way system, where the only way to know is by looking at your bottom line and seeing your subscriber, and revenue, numbers falling. We’re not saying that if you have software you won’t be hacked, but we do know that it is possible to rapidly recover. In addition to the recovery costs themselves, hardware-based systems face the costs of buying in new cards and the logistics of getting them delivered. In places such as North America, France and Italy, there are networks that are pure IPTV, but for satellite, cable and DTT, we believe hybrid is the way to go. Broadcast is an efficient way to get live content to the consumer and I don’t see that going away any time soon. Where IPTV really comes into play is as the mechanism to deliver on-demand services.

Overriding message
The overriding message in the North American market is that they are going IPTV, and it may only be the content going over the QAMs that is encapsulated in the IP packets. There is a perception that if it’s IPTV it has to go over DSL or fibre to the home, but what it really means is that it is IP encapsulated, so it is easier to both serve out, take through a network and deliver to the home devices. One of our larger deployments of both IPTV and two-way cable in Europe is Multimedia Polska. Its deployment is interesting because it has two-way cable boxes that use Osmosys MHP middleware and also IPTV boxes with Minerva middleware.

Smooth migration
There are many operators like Multimedia Polska who have highly interactive two-way subscribers, but that also have an installed base of one-way subscribers that they want to first turn digital, then add tiered services later on as their circumstances change. A single conditional access headend enables a smooth migration without going through different set-top boxes. Running separate headends with IPTV, DVB and analogue technologies can present operators with an unwanted layer of complexity. So we’ve been able to develop our new CAS-5 conditional access product to allow operators to run just the one headend with a single database serving all of their subscribers across both one-way and two-way parts of the network. A lot of cable operators want to run hybrid, but see the broadcast network as being more reliable than one run over DOCSIS, so being able to combine the two means that if anything happens to the IPTV part of the network the consumer is not left with a totally blank screen. It may not be possible to get on-demand services, but linear TV channels will still be there under control of a single CA system, therefore enabling the cable operator to rest easy.
www.latens.com