Cinea, Harmonic, and NDS Developing Integrated Solution for VOD Markets

Integrated VOD platform to provide stream delivery, conditional access, and forensic watermarking for cable, satellite, IPTV, and DVB operators

RESTON, Va. — Cinea, Inc., a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB); Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ: HLIT); and NDS Group (NASDAQ: NNDS) today announced they are developing an integrated video-on-demand (VOD) solution which harnesses Cinea’s Running Marks™ watermarking technology, Harmonic’s VOD platform, and NDS’s conditional access solution VideoGuard®. This integrated-solution architecture can allow system operators to easily deploy VOD with built-in conditional access and session-based watermarking without needing to upgrade their deployed set-top boxes.

Harmonic’s VOD solutions, which include the StreamLiner® video servers and Armada® intelligent content-distribution network software, provide operators with a complete, scalable, and flexible platform for delivery of any video service to a variety of devices.

“We are committed to offering comprehensive, high-quality, and flexible VOD solutions to the marketplace,” said David Price, Vice President of Business Development for Harmonic. “As film release windows become shorter and the popularity of VOD continues to grow, efficiently protecting on-demand content becomes more and more critical. The combination of Cinea’s forensic watermarking capability and NDS’s conditional access solutions with Harmonic’s VOD platform offers operators a best-in-class solution to meet their needs.”

NDS leads the global market in CA and DRM solutions and currently protects the pay TV revenues for over 60 operators of all sizes around the world. With VideoGuard content protection, operators can securely deliver premium content with new TV services that build subscriber loyalty and help them grow their businesses.

“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.”

Cinea’s Running Marks technology adds unique watermarking of individual video streams to the VOD solution, offering both content providers and system operators the potential to identify piracy sources. Additionally, the flexibility of the Running Marks technology allows the watermark message insertion to take place at either the VOD head-end or the customer set-top box.

“System operators have indicated a strong desire to deploy forensic watermarking capabilities across their delivery infrastructure,” said Robert Schumann, General Manager, Cinea. “By including the Running Marks technology in the Harmonic VOD platform with NDS conditional access, the system operator is relieved of the burden of having to do the integration themselves.”