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Irdeto enables pay media companies to provide personal media experience

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Neha
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NEW DELHI, INDIA: Sanjiv Kainth, country manager, India, Irdeto, is in conversation with CIOL, regarding its various services around Media Protection, Multiscreen and Revenue Assurance solutions for pay TV operators, OTT service providers and content owners. Excerpts:

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CIOL: Can you share about IRDETO and Revenue Assurance watermarking technology to our readers.

Sanjiv Kainth: It is being more than 40 years Irdeto has been helping to evolve today's connected day - from enabling the world's first digital satellite pay TV network to the world's first mobile broadcast TV service to nearly every device and medium that a business or consumer engages on a regular basis.

Irdeto enables pay media companies to provide a personal media experience for their consumers, uncover new revenue opportunities and offer new forms of entertainment on broadcast, broadband and mobile networks. The company offers an advanced portfolio of conditional access, rights management, multi-screen, home networking, piracy control and business intelligence services.

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Irdeto started its Indian operation in 2004. Irdeto is one of two leading CA providers in the South Asia region. Currently, we are one of the two leading DTH service provider in South Asia region.

We do have a business segment catering to cable industry. One of our leading products launched two years ago is Software Conditional Access called CLOAKED CA solution. We also have a business on conditional access only for broadcaster as well.

Watermarking is one of the technologies to curb the piracy in India. In lay man language, watermarking is a technique for uniquely identifying the source of a redistributed (pirated) stream with little impact on the consumer. The stream could be a movie, a sports game - any premium content.

Irdeto is committed to not only protecting copyrights, but also human rights. We work with a U.S. based nonprofit foundation called Thorn to leverage our Online Internet Detection services and technology deters and stops child pornography and human trafficking online. We find these services are most often used in the pay media and entertainment world to protect copyrights and intellectual property.

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CIOL: How is it helping organisation to curb Internet piracy and child pornography?



SK: With the development of the Internet and multimedia processing techniques, the protection of multimedia content has become increasingly important. Our Piracy Control, Online Internet Detection and Watermarking can track and protect copyrighted files online and mitigate illegal sharing. Irdeto's session-based watermarking embeds invisible data in the audio and/or video, on a per viewer basis, that can be used to trace back to specific individuals who illegally re-distributed the content. Once the pirated session is identified, it can be shut down and further actions can be taken against the pirate.

CIOL: What is your opinion about on the measure taken by Indian government to curb online piracy in India and how prepared are you to address this?

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SK: Policies are in place but the enforcement of those polices were lacking. Gradually rise in the use of technology also gave rise to the enforcement of policies. Also, the hackers are ten miles ahead of us. We need to recreate the policies timely.

Yes, we are very much ready for the same. We have three technologies to curb the online piracy and the combination of these three will help us. These technologies are fingerprinting techniques, water mark techniques is a digital signature for the copies. In other words, digital watermark is information that is imperceptibly and robustly embedded in the host data such that it cannot be removed.

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There is an app called "Heat Map" - App tracks where the heavy illegal content is being downloaded and we help our operator to fight piracy through this app. It shows you the spot were illegal activity is taking place and in which area.

CIOL: Your recent survey reveals 53 percent of consumers believe smartphones and tablets will replace TV n the next eight years?



SK: With passage of time watching content on other screens will grow rapidly over the next few years. On the go technology services and devices like mobile, tablets, phablets, iPods devices will however replace television sets in the next eight years.

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Consumer television and video viewing preferences has revealed traditional set-top and Smart TV will be still be the preferred platform for watching television shows and movies in 2018. Current generation is the future consumers and they prefer on the go and easy technology.

CIOL: According to you, which are the emerging markets for your solution?

SK: In South Asia region, our emerging markets includes nations likes India, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal and SriLanka. Out of these countries India is the biggest market for us in the entire segment. On the solution side we have multiscreen solution it is end to end cloud base solution, which is optimized and for start-ups. We see there is a huge scope of Catch Tv in India.

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CIOL: What's your share in the India market and who are your clients?



SK: On the cable part of the business that is the Software Conditional Access called CLOAKED CA solution, we have ten operators already for cloaked CA which was introduced two years ago.

 

We have a part of business, conditional access for content broadcaster where our clients includes NDTV, Sun TV, VIACOM 18, RAJ TV, MTV,Ten sports, Colours, and on the broadcast side we have 80 percent of the market share in India. This spectrum is not large in terms of revenue but they are large in terms of importance in industry.

There are seven DTH platforms in South Asia; we are present on three of them - Sun Direct, Videocon D2H and Dilog SriLanka. Both our customer Videocon and Sun Direct has done 10mn activation so far.

CIOL: Do you think a country like India, having poor penetration of broadband, and issues with bandwidth connectivity, is geared up for these services?

SK: The penetration of broadband in India is increasing because the number of Internet user, broadband user is increasing day by day. It is not at a par rate but slowly it is. The bandwidth speed is improving drastically, the download speed because of different services available. The other reason behind the increase in the penetration is the technology evolution that took place in India. People are becoming more tech savvy.

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