Nagravision said this week it would support the OpenCA initiative of the FLO Forum, which means that it is ready and willing to offer conditional access technology for MediaFLO installations, like those juicy deals it has in the US.
Nagra like other prominent CA companies such as NDS, is a member of the FLO Forum, which between them will define, a standard security system for MediaFLO. The OpenCA needs to be able to offer subscriber promotions, free previews, short-term access (one-hour, one-day), impulsive pay-per-view, order-ahead pay-per-view and pay-per-time.
Qualcomm had originally offered its own CA system based loosely on OMA, but later rescinded that decision and invited the DRM-CA community to join it, probably under pressure from its lead customers Verizon and AT&T.
The security element needs to be based on a ‘secured container’ such as a SIM card, and needs to work with portable media players as well as handsets. Interestingly the MediaFLO organization and its customers have not yet said whether or not non-handsets will be allowed to access the Verizon and AT&T mobile TV services.
At the moment Nagravision is fairly dominant in European DVB-H deployments, with Irdeto strong in S-DMB, which is only offered in Korea, while the MediaFLO market leader for CA has yet to emerge. Modeo the Crown Castle subsidiary planning to offer DVB-H services in the US has elected to use Windows Media DRM.