Offering stream delivery, conditional access, and forensic watermarking for cable, satellite, IPTV and DVB operators, Cinea, Inc. and NDS (News - Alert) reportedly have announced they are developing an integrated video-on-demand solution.

 

The solution is expected to enhance Cinea’s Running Marks watermarking technology, Harmonic’s (News - Alert) VOD platform, and NDS’s conditional access solution VideoGuard.

 

NDS is a well known name in CA (News - Alert) and DRM solutions and the company currently protects the pay TV revenues for over 60 operators worldwide. Operators can offer premium content with new TV services that build subscriber loyalty and help them grow their businesses with VideoGuard content protection. They will now get a complete, scalable and flexible platform for delivery of any video service to a variety of devices with Harmonic’s VOD solutions, which include the StreamLiner video servers and Armada intelligent content-distribution network software.

 

Harmonic says the company aims to provide comprehensive, high-quality, and flexible VOD solutions to the marketplace. Protecting on-demand content becomes more and more critical as film release windows become shorter and the popularity of VOD continues to grow. When Harmonic’s VOD platform is combined with Cinea’s forensic watermarking capability and NDS’s conditional access solutions, operators get a best-in-class solution to meet their needs.

 

Now, both content providers and system operators will have the potential to identify piracy sources, as Cinea’s Running Marks technology adds unique watermarking of individual video streams to the VOD solution. Also, the watermark message insertion can take place at either the VOD head-end or the customer set-top box with the flexibility of the Running Marks technology. System operators can now easily deploy VOD with built-in conditional access and session-based watermarking without needing to upgrade their deployed set-top boxes with this integrated-solution architecture.

 

“Customers of our market-leading content-protection technology are showing increased interest in adding forensic watermarking to their systems,” said Nigel Smith, chief marketing officer for NDS. “We needed a solution that could be easily integrated within our security solutions, to enable new content-consumption models. Running Marks’ patented architecture combined with open APIs from NDS make it easy to do so. In addition, Running Marks is the only solution that supports session-specific watermarking of pre-encrypted VOD content, an important feature for IPTV (News - Alert).”