Hearing rumors of a major setback for Irdeto in Korean mobile TV, we checked in to find out if it had indeed lost the contract for supplying conditional access systems to the S-DMB mobile TV service in Korea.
Part of recent announcements from Irdeto have covered the fact that it has Simulcrypt working and the grain of truth in the rumor is that now S-DMB is moving over to allow multiple CA-DRMs to work on what is one of the biggest mobile TV systems in the world.
Korea has two major deployments of mobile TV, one from a satellite with gap fillers called S-DMB that now reaches 1.1 million customers, and which has until now worked exclusively with Irdeto for content protection and another using the DAB terrestrial derivative called T-DMB, which has recently overtaken S-DMB, and has around 2 million customers.
Irdeto points out that since almost the beginning of the relationship with SK Telecom, the major owner of TU Media which runs S-DMB, it has been clear that they intended to use more than one DRM and what has happened most recently is that an in-house system has been tried on the first 100,000 handsets, which meant that it needed to offer the Simulcast services to allow two DRMs to operate at once.
TU Media has worked on its MCAS system over the past 3-4 years and has only just completed the first iteration of the product, so far only with two handset manufacturers, whereas Irdeto is integrated into 18 handset manufacturers offering 50 models.
But it’s still a blow to Irdeto which would have hoped to have convinced SK Telecom that it was not worth implementing its own system. The leg up from the S-DMB installs take Irdeto to 3 million units (including both
include surface mounted device chips and SIMs) shipped into Korea which means that today it can still say that it has more mobile TV protection than any other provider, although its install rate may now suffer.
Irdeto got the head start with S-DMB through its strong relationship with Samsung, and says it has not fallen out with Samsung, and will continue work closely with Samsung and that handsets embedded with Irdeto security are being sold by Samsung into South Africa, Germany and are being trialed in Spain and Hungary.