Content is King; but only if Protected

At the recent Telco TV event, we really saw a feeling of anticipation and appetite not seen in the Telco market since digitisation. Most in the industry agree that the IPTV market is about to take off, we've seen a number of the smaller Telco players start to deploy services, but now the bigger players are starting to make their move.

One thing that will give Telcos the edge in this battle is how quickly they understand the content industry, their grasp of things like release windows and importantly the role DRM and security will play in establishing a good relationship with these suppliers. Content will be king in IPTV service delivery, but only if protected.

"The basic business problem is not about technology it's about securing revenue for pay media operators. That involves some technology, but it also involves understanding the regulatory and legal frameworks, and going after pirates who are attacking operators revenue.", outlines, Doug Lowther, VP Marketing, at Irdeto Access, a specialist content security company. "Nearly 40 years ago we started being active in the broadcast environment and have gained a lot of experience in this field which we now bring to the other network environments. A continuous improvement of content security solutions is necessary to combat piracy successfully."

At the recent Telco TV event, Irdeto Access outlined their Irdeto Plsys solution providing a content security framework for a range of video offerings, and introduced their Epsilon card with Irdeto FlexiFlash technology. The Epsilon card allows smart card software to be securely updated over the air after the cards have already been deployed. This way fundamental changes can be made to actually morph the card to a complete different slate to repel the attack, extending the card's life cycle.

Irdeto Access have been involved in the deployment of IPTV with SureWest Communications, and in addition have been very active in mobile, working with SK Telecom in Korea on the world 's first full scale high quality video broadcast to integrated mobile devices. Their technology is really designed so that content can really be encrypted right at the source, and secured all the way to consumption on the target device.

Lowther continues: "One thing that is very important from a content providers' perspective is for them to understand that the content needs to be secure from end to end because one characteristic of IP, as the music industry has learned to its peril, is that once the genie is out of the bottle, it is very difficult to put it back."

One of the biggest challenges for new operators is the difference between the Telco business and the broadcaster pay media business. Lowther explains that, "Traditionally Telcos have not needed to worry about content. Their main concern has been getting a very high quality network in place. In broadcast this is not the case - so there is this new supplier who Telcos have not interacted with before . Moreover, this supplier fundamentally controls the whole business, and so the Telcos are having to learn about things like release windows, the way the studios work and their concerns about content security. The quality of the content security has a big influence on not only what content you can get but how early in the release windows and release cycles you can get it."

This seems especially the case in terms of VOD. "You need as early a release window as possible because you are just not competing with other Telcos, you are competing with video rental outlets and if that model works 2 months before VOD then you've got a big problem with your business." , explains Lowther.

"The overall trend with content is that it is becoming much more personalized, and people are going to start getting the content they want to consume around their lives rather than fitting their lives around the content. You can already see this with PVRs , TIVO and technologies like that - and this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Even with teenagers today - they are creating their own personalised content and exchanging it with friends. Therefore, technologies have to be flexible enough to enable those sorts of content to be created and distributed around a network."

What is clear is that the environment has become a lot more diverse, meaning that suppliers have to get much more flexible and nimble in terms of embedding their technology into all sorts of consumer electronics devices. This is especially true with PVRs. Lowther outlines: "Now we have to deal with very high end products like PVRs where you have the challenge of protecting the content sitting on the hard disk and we have to deal with low end zapper boxes. You have to deal with mobile phones which are actually quite capable platforms technically as they actually have more memory and processing power than most set top boxes now and you have to deal with IPTV technologies where the STB may boot itself from the network every time it powers up.

He continues, "The biggest challenge with PVRs is that you don't want content to be stored in a file format in the clear .Essentially you need to encrypt to a hardisk, and then when the hardisk plays out its content you need to decrypt just as if that content were arriving from the network at that point in time. Then there are background challenges. Is the operator using a push model, where they are identifying content that you might like and initiate the download of that content. This is more complicated than a Pay Per View service because the subscriber isn't necessarily the initiator ordering that service. It means you now need to download the content and the associated rights and permissions, so the subscriber can try it out and view it for say 10 minutes for free."

Fundamentally for any content protection company, the challenge is to be more an end to end player thus being aware of the network and how it works, and how to protect content from where it is created to where it is consumed. The second challenge is to get embedded into all these different types of consumer electronic devices because the consumer wants the freedom to look at content at any time they want on any device they want.

Lowther concludes: "We are also working on a new content security technology which allows the content, once has been delivered to the subscriber's home, to be moved around from device to device within a home network in a secure environment. It is very important that you have a single supplier that can offer that whole puzzle, because while its technically possible to do a little CA or DRM, every time you have content in the clear, especially if it is stored on a hard disk, you have the potential for that content to escape."

    www.irdetoaccess.com