Latens CAS Selected for Transition to Digital of Swiss Cable Operator ESR

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
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L’Energie de Sion-Région SA selects Latens CAS solution and Latens Super Encryptor for digital transition of its analog cable subscriber base

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Latens Systems, the leading provider of software security solutions for Pay-TV & IPTV, and L’Energie de Sion-Région SA (ESR) a utility company in the Sion region of Switzerland, today announced that ESR has selected Latens CAS to protect its new DVB-C cable system. ESR plans to start transitioning its analog consumers to the new digital cable system, commencing Q2, 2008.

ESR is a full-service utility company offering cable TV, electricity, gas, telecommunications and water. It has chosen Latens CAS to protect the revenues and content for the transition of its analogue cable TV to a new digital DVB-C system. The system will provide ESR customers with VOD and network PVR services as well as SD and HD video.

“Moving to DVB-C we wanted to take full advantage of all that digital offers, one important positive is being able to deploy software CA which has lower acquisition and running costs combined with much higher flexibility,” says Dominique Barras CTO, ESR. “We chose Latens CAS because it was the only software CA on the market that could protect a DVB-C system efficiently at the same time as providing high flexibility.”

Latens CAS is a next generation, standards compliant conditional access system optimized for the broadband digital cable market. The system has been built on the knowledge and experience of the cable industry. Latens has taken a fresh look at the technical advantages created by the innovative use of improvements in software security to design a standards based CA solution that is capable of providing cable operators of all sizes with the many advantages of software-based CA.

Latens CAS is differentiated from legacy CA systems by the following key features:

  • Latens CAS is a pure software solution which replaces the proprietary smart cards or embedded set-top solutions of traditional CAS vendors with a downloadable CAS system using innovative Secure Software Modules. This provides a more dynamic, secure anti-piracy strategy at a much lower cost.
  • Latens has designed the system with the flexibility to support the diverse range of business models encountered in various digital cable markets.
  • Latens CAS scales elegantly and economically from thousands to millions of cable subscribers

“I’m really pleased to announce ESR as a new cable operator client. Cable is a particular specialization of Latens. Our award winning software CA was designed around the business and technical problems faced by cable operators and, unlike most of our competitors that provide software CA, we designed all our security systems from day one to scale and to use open standards wherever possible. This makes us the software CA vendor best suited to enabling the business models and protecting the revenues of cable operators,” says Andy Mathieson, Director, Latens.