Netherlands based Irdeto, said this week it has upgraded its existing conditional access system at cable company Telia Stofa to include support for the company’s hybrid “Zaptor” service, which delivers live radio and TV and advanced interactive services to more than 20,000 cable subscribers in Denmark. Telia Stofa is part of TeliaSonera and is Denmark’s second largest supplier of cable TV and broadband Internet services, connecting approximately 600,000 homes across the country.
Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget, part of Telenor, has signed up with Ruckus Wireless, for its Smart Wi-Fi 802.11g systems to wirelessly distribute its IPTV service around a home. The Ruckus MediaFlex systems are being made available to consumers in Sweden through Telenor retail outlets, for self-install.
Quative, part of the Kudelski Group, which offers a service delivery platform for customer authentication, subscriber management, provisioning for all types of pay TV service, said that it has been selected by B.Net Croatia, the national cable operator, to provide an end-to-end interactive TV system for its broadband cable system. Harmonic will provide the encoding, while everything else will come from Quative and its sister companies. B.net is part of the Austrian BEWAG group and has over 100,000 TV cable subscribers.
The Kudelski Group also said this week at the IPTV World Forum that it has taken end to end responsibility from headend to set-top box for the Portugal Telecom new hybrid satellite-broadband Pay-TV services to be launched in 2008. The Kudelski Group will act as the systems integrator and is leveraging its entire suite of products to introduce subscription SD and HD services. It will use its OpenTV set top software, Quative Service Delivery Platform, Lysis Content Management and Nagravision will provide the conditional access.
NDS said this week that Digital Entertainment Networks (DEN), a new entrant in the Indian digital cable market, will use NDS’ VideoGuard conditional access system as well as its MediaHighway middleware and its EPG. DEN claims it has a pan-Indian cable footprint, and will work with NDS which has 800 people at its R&D facility there in Bangalore. Separately NDS said this week that Tele Columbus, one of the larger Germany cable operators, will use its VideoGuard conditional access system to protect its services.
The UK incumbent BT said this week that it will add new applications, such as gaming and teleshopping on its BT Vision hybrid DVB-T/IPTV service. The company also said this week that customers had now reached 210,000 and that this was on track towards its stated aim of acquiring 3 million customers in the medium term.
Set top browser company ANT announced this week that both Amino and Hyundai have selected ANT Galio client for next generation set tops. The AmiNET530 set top will have Galio, offering HD content with an on board DV. We presume that the Hyundai set top is also HD, given that Korea networks are inherently HD.