Asia-Pacific the Largest Growth Market for Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management

NEW YORK — Continued growth in pay TV services across Asia is driving the region to become the leading pay-TV DRM and conditional access market in term of total revenue, according to ABI Research. While today’s leading market in North America sees some overall decrease due to market saturation for pay TV services and infrastructure, uptake in the Asia-Pacific region will increase throughout the forecast period, driven in particular by growth in telco TV and satellite markets, to a revenue of $612 million by 2013.

“The market for pay-TV services shows strong growth in the Asia-Pacific area, particularly in India and China,” says research director Michael Wolf. “The interest in traditional linear pay TV services as well as interactive and on-demand content in these markets continues to grow. Additionally, we see high-definition as another driver for content protection.”

This year many large and emerging conditional access players have invested in Asia -Pac and seen their business grow. Vendors such as NDS Group, Widevine and Irdeto have continued to invest in the Asia-Pacific market, with much of their growth benefiting telco, satellite and cable pay TV platforms. Widevine announced growth within operators such as Chungwa Telecom, while NDS saw its business within India DBS operator TaTa Sky grow to over two million subscribers using its conditional access system.

While much of the growth for conditional access (CA) and DRM will come from Asia in the next few years, ABI Research also sees Europe as a market that will experience growth in all of the major pay TV formats (cable, telco TV and satellite). North America will see declines in the cable and satellite conditional access market, but will have the strongest overall telco TV CA and DRM growth in coming years due to the push by large telcos such as Verizon and AT&T into the pay TV business.

“DRM and Conditional Access” examines the role of conditional access technology in the pay TV market. It covers factors driving and restraining the growth of the market, and discusses the available solutions as applicable to cable, telco, and satellite.

It forms part of the firm’s Digital Media Research Service.