DRM and Conditional Access supplier Irdeto this week acquired IDway SAS, a French set top middleware company based in Paris. No details of the transaction were disclosed but this looks like a way of getting some satellite and cable set top capability on-board to rival the Nagravision owned OpenTV, which dominates this sector in Europe.
OpenTV was bought in October last year for $132 million, and is known for its interactive applications, mostly delivered to non-US cable companies and claims to have a dominant market share in set top software which offers DVR, VOD and other on-demand services, Electronic Program Guides, on-demand content syndication, interactive applications, and enhanced and interactive advertising. Before the acquisition by Nagravision’s parent Kudelski, it worked equally with all the Conditional Access suppliers in Europe.
Irdeto has been working with IDway for the past year and the relationship was said to come about because of the amount of work Irdeto does in Asia including some of the poorer countries. The idea was to be to offer an integrated set top stack that is cheap for countries where price is everything.
A spokesman for Irdeto told us, ‘Sometimes clients cannot afford the top of the range services that some of our software partners pride themselves on, which is why we bought IDway.’ But reading between the lines it wouldn’t surprise us if OpenTV now had one price for Nagravision and another price for all of its rivals, skewing bids in its favor and forcing Irdeto to go looking for another partner.
IDway offers standards based middleware, pre-integrated with Irdeto’s conditional access, and the deal allows Irdeto to synchronize the two product roadmaps. IDway provides MHP compliant set tops plus IDway-J, a Java based client that supports DVB-S, DVB-T and DVB-C stacks in either free to air or PayTV environments and offers EPG and DVR services as well as support for most Western and Asian languages. So very similar to OpenTV.
Graham Kill, CEO of Irdeto said, “This expanded relationship with IDway will help it grow to the next level and for Irdeto to offer middleware to segments of the market that complement those from Irdeto’s long-established middleware partners, such as OpenTV,” which kind of gives the game away.