Conditional access specialist NDS, part of the News Corporation empire, said this week that it has added the capability for its set tops to network together in a home by sharing disk resources.
The aim is to reduce DVR set top costs by sharing their disk space between them in one central store, and it says it uses peer to peer technology to share out video storage across multiple set tops, to reduce home bandwidth requirements. We think NDS is using Peer to peer in the sense of one peer talking directly to another, rather than in the traditional file sharing sense.
NDS has added the capabilities to its Synamedia IPTV middleware and calls the two new patent pending applications distributed DVR and ShareTV. The capabilities when combined with its Jungo’s home gateways should offer transparent home video sharing. Jungo makes residential gateways and was acquired by NDS in December last year.
The trick is to store video on a single shared set top anywhere in the home, but also take care of the encryption and serve it up in trick play mode. So it pretty much had to be a conditional access supplier that designed this type of system.
Distributed DVR uses plug and play outlets to select suitable external hard drives for DVR TV storage, so when a home needs several set tops it only has to have one with storage, or can work with a single external drive for all of them. The subscriber is not restricted by the amount of storage provided in the set top and can add as much storage to the home network as required to store recorded programs.
ShareTV allows IPTV subscribers to legally share around the home their stored TV content using peer-to-peer technology running in the Jungo Residential Gateway software and manages the download of the content from other peers on the operator’s network.
NDS announced this on the same day that its financial results for the year came out, with revenues up 8% to $165 million for the quarter, improved operating income and a rise to 69.9 million homes which use its CA system, which probably takes it well beyond rival Nagravision. There are also 50 million set tops now using NDS middleware, the company says.
NDS reported that it has recently signed a deal with Turkish media group Dogan, which will put its CA system in reach of another 17 million households and says it has also added new customers in Europe, China and India and is getting increasing license fees as it begins to ship more DVR version of its set tops, which are more expensive, to companies such as DirecTV.
The company didn’t publicly address the very serious concern that in the long term, if the deal to sell DirecTV to Liberty Media goes ahead, Liberty has already said it is interested in ditching NDS Conditional Access and merging it with the CA system of EchoStar, which uses rival Nagravision’s technology. If that happens it would make a hole in NDS revenue during 2008 at the earliest.