ABI Research Releases Report on Conditional Access Systems Market

In its new report, titled, “Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management for Pay TV Markets,” ABI Research (News - Alert) focuses on the conditional access systems (CAS) market.

Within the pay TV infrastructure, ABI Research’s report, “Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management for Pay TV Markets,” covers worldwide markets for CAS and DRM technologies. It provides market shares of managed subscribers on a regional and platform level as well as revenue forecasts for the markets.

Focusing on DVB Simulcrypt and downloadable/renewable CAS technologies, it highlights business implications of a number of the technological changes in the space.

“Traditional CAS vendors are working hard to adapt their solutions for Telco’s IPTV (News - Alert) platforms as well as protecting content to multiple screens. NDS just announced their VideoGuard Connect solution in order to deliver DRM technologies to their CAS customers. Motorola acquired SecureMedia last year for similar reasons,” said Sam Rosen, senior analyst, digital home. “If Google (News - Alert) integrates Widevine DRM with Motorola MediaCipher and markets it to operators successfully, they would have a complete and very competitive solution.”

Nagra, NDS and Motorola (News - Alert) are the leading worldwide CAS vendors based on number of managed boxes. China Digital TV has recently passed Cisco for the fourth position based on strong digitization of Asian cable platforms. Google’s Widevine and Microsoft’s (News - Alert) PlayReady and Silverlight lead the market in the DRM space.

The worldwide market for pay TV CAS and DRM will grow at a relatively modest 15% from $2.2 billion in 2011 to $2.5 billion in 2016, the company stated in a press release.

Recently, the company published another survey where it stated that Small cell backhaul is yet to generate interest in line with the attention generated by the outdoor small cells. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of any significant deployment for outdoor small cell.

Moreover, operators are still in the process of trialing and testing small cell backhaul technologies, especially the newer contenders.