CityHomeNet Chooses Irdeto to Drive Transition from Analogue to Digital TV Services

Russian internet and TV provider in Novosibirsk implements Irdeto’s CAS to protect its Satellite Digital Video Broadcast services

MOSCOW, Russia — Irdeto (JSE: NPN), the global leader in securing and delivering premium content and digital assets, today announced that CityHomeNet, the leading internet and pay TV provider in the Novosibirsk region, Russia, is using Irdeto’s Conditional Access System (CAS) to protect its Direct to Home (DTH) Satellite Digital Video Broadcast services (DVB-S) services. The solution has been implemented within NMSK, a service subsidiary of CityHomeNet.

Victor Poptsov, CEO of NMSK, commented: “Irdeto has enabled us to invest in premium digital content, helping us attract a growing number of subscribers as we motivate customers to transfer from analogue to digital TV services with added High Definition (HD) and premium channels. Knowing we have the most stringent content security means we can develop new services in our network and continue to drive business growth.”

The solution, which is now live across Russia, responds to the growing and increasingly competitive Pay-TV market in Russia. According to Discovery Research, there were 18.5 million Pay-TV subscribers in mid-2009, while the market grew by 15 per cent last year and was worth just over one billion dollars.

David Canellos, senior vice president of sales and marketing, Irdeto, said: “As competition continues to intensify in the CEE and CIS markets for digital Pay-TV, content providers need to deliver top-quality content and service offerings that protect their revenue streams. CityHomeNet is setting the standard by developing secure offerings that provide the choice of quality programming that consumers now demand. The pressure is now on for today’s content providers to deliver content at anytime, anyway, anywhere and to any one as they contend with a diverse and complex set of media devices. Irdeto is helping its customers to securely distribute and monetize their most valuable digital assets directly and on-demand into the hands of individuals.”

Setting a new industry standard, Irdeto’s CAS offers a state-of-the-art hardware platform, software technology and cryptography and is one of the most secure conditional access (CA) solutions on the market today. Providing layers of security, including renewability and diversity, to protect digital assets from creation, to distribution and consumption, its solution is fully backward compatible and supports all deployed Irdeto smart cards and set-top boxes, simplifying migration and protecting operators’ investments.