Researcher Current Analysis has taken on the thorny task of comparing the different content security products out there ‘ very different conditional access and DRM systems ‘ and coming up, strangely enough, with the conclusion that UK-Israeli specialist NDS has the overall number one ranking. NDS is pretty much accepted as the global market leader, with only Nagravision prepared to argue the toss.
The 8 company ranking order was NDS, Irdeto, with Nagravision and Verimatrix tied for third, Widevine, Latens, Viaccess and then Secure Media.
The three key elements which Current Analysis said it assessed were network flexibility, integration, and cost and it said operators seek flexibility to distribute content across multiple network systems want rapid integration with headend, middleware and content delivery and a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
‘Operators are increasingly leveraging IP technology to expand their consumer video service offerings with functionality such as interactive services and non-linear content. This puts increased demand on content security vendors for enabling operator business model flexibility to provide differentiated services,’ said Yoav Schreiber, Senior Analyst, Digital Media Infrastructure.
The suppliers won’t thank Current Analysis for their efforts, and will continue to bicker about who is best for years to come, but this report might give some guidance to operators that have yet to make up their minds ‘ which is largely none.
Recently Faultline suggested to some of these suppliers that they undergo a similar exercise with us, but this foundered on what each vendor wished to convey and where they saw their strengths as in the market. NDS is not strong in IPTV, but insists that it makes a great offering across three screens, and is especially powerful in satellite DTH systems – which is hardly surprising given where it came from. Essentially it is an easier task, and therefore cheaper, to stop service theft when you have a two way signal, such as in cable and IPTV- which makes satellite require more robust encryption, supported by hardware. But at the same time, that usually makes NDS quite expensive and a total cost of ownership would not be complete without a calculation of the cost of recovering from a partial hack.
Widevine sees itself as the only company that can work with web video, IPTV and handset video with its existing product line, but began life in IPTV; Verimatrix also has an offering across three screens and also began life in IPTV and also has some unique online authentication checks to prevent service theft. Irdeto and Nagravision both have strong head starts in mobile TV protection but arguably these two also have the widest range of offerings.
Latens got its start in life retrofitting DRM to systems that had already been installed in the clear, and we are sure is by far the cheapest system to install, but have no idea of TCO. Also this is all assuming that the aim is prevention of service theft, but these systems also have to prevent content theft, which is not the same thing at all, and here we know that the watermarking of Verimatrix and Widevine may give them one edge. All the rest of these systems are prone to content theft through recording an analog copy and then re-encoding it.
And where’s Microsoft? We know that a client wanted content protection for its Silverlight and its IPTV and that it opened its DRM to Widevine, but most of the Microsoft IPTV customers are protected using a hardware assisted version of its Windows Media DRM. But it’s not mentioned in the report as far as we can see despite it being far more widely installed than many of the IPTV offerings, and the Sun DReaM open source system, used as DReaMCAS in Korea, is also not mentioned, but since it is free, it much have quite a low cost of ownership.
The other thing to consider is that over the years there are almost no change of suppliers at cable operators or satellite operators of their existing conditional access supplier. Such a change is carried out on the basis of reputation and ease of transition, and even then only when there is a widely known public hack.