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Stephen Christian, VP of Marketing, Verimatrix.

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Doug Lowther, Senior VP of sales and marketing, Irdeto.

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Azhar al-Malik, VP of marketing and PR at Showtime.

As digital content is made available across a variety of delivery platforms, pirates are presented with new opportunities to access and distribute unencrypted material. John Parnell spoke to the industry’s top conditional access (CA) vendors about the challenges they face and how they are working to ensure their clients remain one step ahead of the hackers.

With many broadcasters investing large sums of money in order to offer new services across a variety of platforms and in new formats, maximising revenue becomes even more important in the face of these rising implementation costs.

As a result, the conditional access (CA) industry has been handed a host of new challenges to contend with. But as the stakes are raised, so too are the rewards.

The combined revenue of the global CA industry, covering cable, satellite and telecommunications services, will reach US$1.7 billion in 2013, according to ABI Research.

The conditional access vendors may be enjoying market growth, but the technological challenges and the emergence of software-based systems has shaken up an industry that had previously  focused primarily on maintaining legacy smartcard-based systems.

"The availability of content via the internet has had by far the largest impact on the industry," says Doug Lowther, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Irdeto.

"In many countries, teenagers are spending more time on the PC than in front of the TV, and this trend will continue as consumers demand increasingly personalised viewing experiences."

Rather than being a threat however, Lowther believes broadcasters would be better served to utilise these new technologies suggesting that traditional transmission methods remain best for linear broadcasting whilst IP is a better solution for on-demand content.

"Content can be monetised in a variety of ways. CA companies have to enable this, regardless of the network it's transmitted on, or the device which receives it. Monetisation can occur in more ways than an exchange of money - content producers are increasingly generating revenue from advertising for their web-based content, for example," he claims.

Lowther accepts that piracy is unavoidable and as long as the broadcasters have something of value, there will be those in society who will try to obtain it by illegal means.

"It's an unfortunate aspect of human nature. And digital content is no less subject to this natural law than anything else," he says. "The challenge therefore lies not just in preventing such attacks, but in developing strategies for effectively responding to them when they occur."

Irdeto has an international network of staff that track piracy issues and specific incidents.

"It is important that we investigate and cooperate with law enforcement officials to punish pirates to the letter of the law. We implement and devise operational countermeasures and investigate the supply chain behind any suspicious activity that we uncover. We also participate in industry standards bodies and public policy organisations to secure stricter anti-piracy legislation and protect intellectual property rights," claims Lowther.

With so much at stake, broadcasters will always seek guarantees from their CA supplier. Providing absolute assurance is difficult to do, however. Whilst the future may be uncertain, Lowther says that the best guarantee a CA company can offer is its own track record. He claims that Irdeto has now operated for seven years without confronting smart card piracy.

Not so smart

The most fundamental technological change in the CA market in the past few years has been the shift away from smartcard-based solutions.

While Latens offers software-only products, the company's VP of marketing Andy Mathieson believes that smartcards are not obsolete, yet.

"I think that smartcards are the de facto standard and if you look at the huge number particularly in satellite and terrestrial one-way networks, it is the standard. NDS must have 80 million smartcards employed by satellite operators around the world and that is not going to change overnight," claims Mathieson.

"But as people accept that you don't need smartcards there will be a shift towards solutions that don't employ them. It will take a while but it will inevitably happen."

As an obvious advocate of software solutions Mathieson may not be impartial, however he does raise some valid criticisms of existing smartcard CA systems.

"One problem with smartcards is that you want to avoid changing them if you can help it because of the costs associated with doing that and its impact on subscribers. So there is a financial incentive to keep each smartcard in use for as long as possible," he claims. "With software, if you think you have a security problem or that you are going to have a security problem, you can afford to initiate a change. That is a huge difference in security terms."

Mathieson claims that security for hundreds of thousands of subscribers can be updated in a few minutes with a software system. Despite these benefits, convincing the operators to turn away from smartcards is not easy.

"The problem in the first place was convincing clients that software-based CA was safe," he explains. "Industry organisations are often sceptical of a new system. It was the same with the big studios. They often use technical audit houses to assess various systems. We had our software audited; it took nine months and cost a fortune. They looked at every aspect of our system and how it would be implemented."

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