to serve and protect

widevine guards the goods for iptv

WIDEVINE TECHNOLOGIES INC. MAY NOT BE a household name, but its content security technology is an important component in delivering IPTV services in locales from Utah to Taiwan and beyond. And the company expects to announce another major new customer by SUPERCOMM this month, Brian Baker, president and CEO of Widevine, tells xchange.

Widevine’s Brian Baker

According to a December 2004 study by ABI Research, Widevine is the leader in conditional access for telco/IP platforms, ahead of such venerable legacy video infrastructure vendors as Irdeto Access, Motorola Inc., Nagravision, NDS Ltd. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc. Conditional access competitors Irdeto Access, Nagravision and NDS supply equipment mostly to satellite operators, says Baker, while Widevine has close to 80 percent of the content security market for IPTV.

Widevine counts Taiwan’s state-owned ChungHwa Telecom Co. Ltd., which has one of the largest IPTV deployments in the world, as one of its customers. The company also has announced contracts with Arvig Communications of Detroit Lakes, Minn.; SaskTel of Canada; UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency); and others.

The company also provides equipment to two of the three largest independent telcos in North America and is working with all of the RBOCs, Baker says, adding that Widevine is the only security vendor whose technology interoperates with Microsoft’s IPTV software, which BellSouth Corp., SBC Communications Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have all signed on to use.

At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show this spring in Las Vegas, Widevine demonstrated its interoperability with Microsoft’s IPTV solution and hosted an educational event called Hollywood Studio Nights. “We’ll have reps from all the major movie studios, broadcasters and more than 100 telcos to discuss issues around content protection,” said Baker, speaking to xchange from the NAB show. “Widevine today is the only IPTV content [security] vendor that can show this level of relationship.”

Shortly after it was founded in 1999, Widevine began working with major movie studios and determined there was a significant disconnect between carrier and studio requirements related to content security, explains Baker, so the company spent the next three years designing solutions for conditional access/digital rights management.

The company today sells key management, which allows individuals to get access to content to which they have subscribed, and supplies an encryption product for on-demand content that meets demands of broadcasters and studios, says Baker.

The Widevine Cypher Suite and implementation services enable operators to obtain premium on-demand titles. Cypher Suite contains patent pending technologies for VoD (Cypher VOD), digital broadcast (Cypher Broadcast), conditional access/digital rights management (Cypher CA) and Digital Copy Protection (Cypher DCP).

Baker says Widevine also is credited with inventing the Virtual SmartCard, downloadable security software within a set-top box that can be replaced remotely by the service provider. This technology is important, he explains, because the Virtual SmartCard can be replaced instantly and at no cost to the operator in the event of a security breach, whereas replacing a physical card is in excess of $20 per subscriber. Widevine has one patent issued on the Virtual SmartCard and 22 pending.

Several equipment vendors use Widevine’s security solutions in their products.

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For example, Amino Communications, a provider of small, low-cost, high functionality set-top boxes for IPTV, secures its AmiNET500 PVR set-top boxes with the Cypher Virtual SmartCard from Widevine.

Widevine also has partnerships with Alcatel and Motorola, two of the key infrastructure vendors for the RBOC FTTx builds.

Alcatel has a partnership with Widevine to sell, service and support the Widevine Virtual SmartCard and Application Level encryption on a global basis.

Motorola has integrated the Widevine Virtual SmartCard and Application Level encryption on the company’s Multi-Service Access Platform for video over xDSL and fiber. The integrated video solution is marketed jointly by Widevine and Motorola. The Motorola Multi-Service Access platform currently delivers digital video to more than 90 percent of today’s North American installed base of telco TV services.

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