The second largest French cellco, SFR has chosen an Irdeto DRM system to secure its mobile TV broadcasts once they begin. SFR is a Vodafone affiliate which is majority owned by Vivendi.
Presumably the system will be used on the new French DVB-H system expected to be built by mid-2008, and which will allow multiple carriers their own competing services from the same spectrum slice.
In order to do that each operator will need to select their own DRM, and traditionally Orange will go with an offering from in-house Via Access. So the system will have to be run using ‘simulcrypt’ a way of running DRM systems side by side standardized in the DVB Project for pay TV.
SFR already has its own 3G streaming TV services and says that it has 3 million customers for these channels.
Irdeto has been the leading supplier of encryption and DRM for mobile TV because it protects the Korean S-DMB system with over 1 million customers, but European rival Nagravision has been catching up by nailing most of the European business to date.