Indian national broadcaster Doordarshan is in talks to acquire ByDesign India’s conditional access system (CAS) so as to increase the numbers of channels offered on DD Freedish from 64 to 112 by the end of march 2016.
Deputy Director General (DDG) of DD, C.K Jain, announced recently about the move from mpeg2 Set-Top-Box (STB) to mpeg4 STB.
“We are also migrating our technology from mpeg2 to mpeg4 but ensuring that the existing subscribers continue to receive the signal. In fact, to ensure that the customers who have mpeg2 Set-Top-Boxes (STBs) continue to receive the channels, we are migrating in phases,” said Jain.
It is believed the first phase of migration to mpeg4 might begin in early January next year.
The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) approved late last year a proposal by ByDesign India to develop an Indian CAS. The company is said to have received a financial support of US$ 2.9 million from DeitY to develop the new system in association with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
The ByDesign model is totally indigenous and built for DVB-C setup. This CAS solution will enable broadcasters to control access to their services by viewers, and thereby enabling them to extend their business models to subscription based schemes.
This will mean that the Freedish will become encrypted but will remain FTA. In addition to helping increase the number of channels on the platform, this will enable Freedish to gauge the exact number of households relying on Freedish as encrypted set top boxes (STBs) will only be available with authorised dealers.
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