NDS SEES CONTENT PROTECTION ALLIANCE WITH CE MAKER
News Corp.’s NDS Technologies subsidiary expects to forge an alliance with an unidentified CE company within 2 weeks to develop product compliant with the fledgling Secure Video Processor (SVP) digital content protection standard developed with STMicroelectronics, NDS executives told Consumer Electronics Daily.
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NDS expects SVP-compliant logic chips will find their first applications in PVRs, followed by DTVs and a host of portable and mobile CE devices, Vp-Business Development Carmi Bogot told us. NDS officials declined to identify the potential CE partner. “The first one we're doing will be in a chip that’s a sending device in a PVR, which is more complicated than if it were for receiving,” Bogot said. “It’s more effective as the content gets more complicated.” SVP will support the proposed broadcast flag initiative and will be inexpensive to realize because it’s based on an open standard, Bogot said.
The SVP web site lists only NDS and STMicroelectronics as “partners.” In a white paper scheduled for distribution in May at the NCTA show in New Orleans, NDS differentiates SVP as a more comprehensive solution than content protection standards such as 5C and DFAST. It describes 5C and DFAST as “interface protection mechanisms that attempt to protect the transfer of content over specific media but don’t provide an end-to-end method for controlling rights to content.” New forms of digital copying and storage are becoming available to mainstream consumers that make it easier for the public to “evade restrictions on content,” the white paper says. In contrast, it says, SVP “offers reliable protection for content, wherever that content resides and however it is accessed.” As a result, it says, SVP can offer the content community “the confidence to permit better viewing windows for new movie releases, opening up new business opportunities both for the content providers and the network operators who distribute the content.”
Bogot also said SVP will work “really well” with the NDS “XTV” PVR platform. He wouldn’t comment on whether XTV eventually would replace TiVo as the platform in DirecTV combination receivers and PVRs, as a result of the News Corp. acquisition of DirecTV parent Hughes Electronics. “NDS has not announced an XTV relationship with DirecTV at this point,” Bogot said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t be doing it; we just haven’t announced it.” This year, DirecTV renewed its agreement with NDS to supply conditional access technology for its satellite receivers.
NDS ultimately also will integrate its middleware platform with MediaHighway, which it acquired from Thomson last fall. Bogot conceded that MediaHighway was a “more robust” platform than NDS’s and maintained that combining the 2 might make a good fit for DirecTV, which doesn’t have middleware. “To do advanced services you really need the middleware,” Bogot said. “We have one, but we wanted to beef up that part of the business to make it stronger and provide a more well-rounded offering for our customers.” Bogot conceded platform integration would occur “a bit slower than you want” because of the need to honor contracts, Bogot said.
NDS also is involved in trials with several mobile phone service providers to deploy its digital rights management software for cellphones, Bogot said. The tests mainly are being done on GSM 1.5G and 2G networks in Europe, but NDS is close” to landing an agreement for CDMA in S. Korea, he said.