ITV

Tag: smartcards

  • Malaysian billionaire sues NDS

    Malaysian billionaire sues NDS

    MUMBAI: Suits and countersuits are flying thick and fast around the technology arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, NDS Group.

    A day after NDS countersued DirecTV, claiming its ex-customer had misappropriated trade secrets, a Malaysian billionaire, Ananda Krishnan, has pitched into the fray, afr.com, quoting The Los Angeles Times, has reported today.

    Krishnan’s Malaysian satellite group, MEASAT Broadcast Network Systems, had applied last Friday to intervene in proceedings in California between NDS and rival encryption group Canal Plus Technologies.

    MEASAT’s entry into the proceedings adds a new twist to this ongoing saga as Canal Plus was to have dropped its suit as part of a deal struck earlier this month when its parent company, Vivendi Communications, sold its Italian pay-TV operation, Telepi, to News Corp.

    No details were available of the claim by MEASAT, which uses CPT encryption smartcards with its Astro satellite pay-TV service in Malaysia. It has an estimated 800,000 subscribers.

    US satellite broadcaster DirecTV sued NDS for fraud, while its “almost but not quite partner” EchoStar, applied to intervene in the Canal Plus case, claiming that NDS had also hacked its NagraStar smartcard.

    NDS has repeatedly denied all allegations, which its says are “baseless and motivated by a desire on the part of certain persons and entities to cause harm to NDS and to thwart legitimate competition from NDS”.

  • NDS hits 30 m mark on pay-TV subscribers

    NDS hits 30 m mark on pay-TV subscribers

    AMSTERDAM (HOLLAND): News Corp subsidiary NDS claims that it has become the world’s first company to supply smartcards to 30 million active digital pay-TV subscribers.

    The declaration comes after the highest-ever revenues in any quarter for NDS announced in August 2002 , which were 65.0 million and a 20 per cent increase over the last quarter of the previous financial year. For the full year, revenues increased 12 per cent from 215.6 million to 240.8 million, with conditional access revenues at 41.7 million for the quarter, a company release states.

    2002 continued to be a record year for NDS and growth has been strong in US, UK, Israel and Asia-Pacific. In addition, NDS recently reached an agreement with Scientific-Atlanta to implement its conditional access technology into Explorer digital interactive set-tops that will be provided to Cablevision.

    In June this year, Motorola agreed to integrate NDS interactive and conditional access solutions with their digital set-top boxes. In the UK and Israel NDS customers have continued to experience growth in subscriber numbers as they offer advanced interactive television on low cost set-top boxes. Asia-Pacific has been boosted by the launch of SkyLife in Korea and initial roll-out of set-top boxes is now occurring in China. Sichuan Provincial Network launched its digital interactive TV service in May 2002, using NDS’s end-to-end solutions, including the Open VideoGuard conditional access system.