Our take...
IPTV platforms will experience larger subscriber growth than the traditional TV platforms over the next 5 years. However, the majority of technology shipment volumes will remain with traditional platforms during the period. It will be vital to the long term survival of many of the IPTV-centric technology start-ups to migrate their products to traditional platforms.

Smartcard-based conditional access technologies are currently the dominant force across DTH, cable and DTT platforms and have for the most part been successful in preventing piracy. However, there are few smartcard-based systems that have not yet been compromised; the most recent high profile breach being the Nagravision system protecting German pay TV operator Premiere's DTH offering. When a smartcard based system is compromised it requires a card swap to fix the problem which involves sending new cards out to subscribers who must carry out the replacement themselves. This often takes months to complete.

DCAS solutions such as those deployed extensively on IPTV platforms can potentially minimise these exposure times significantly. Instead of sending out physical smartcards to subscribers in a DCAS environment new virtual smartcards are pushed to subscribers STBs "over the air". By using downloads to secure broadcasts, the entire system can be updated much more rapidly and without subscribers even knowing it happened. However, without a return path, downloadable CAS is potential at risk from software piracy, arguably more difficult to control than hardware smartcard piracy.