Fransat and HD+, TV Leaders in France and Germany, Adopt Intertrust’s Revolutionary XCA Platform

French and German TV Operators Join other Free TV Alliance Members in Adopting Secure Content-Security Technology for Smart TVs and Set-Top Boxes

Amsterdam - IBC 2019(17 Sep 2019)

Intertrust, the pioneer in Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, today announced that Fransat and HD+, France and Germany’s leading free TV operators, have selected Intertrust’s ExpressPlay XCA™ to protect and manage video streams over major broadcast and IPTV networks. The world’s first system that converges conditional access (CA) and DRM content protection for pay TV network operators and broadcasters, ExpressPlay XCA offers a unified content-security platform for broadcast, IPTV and broadband over-the-top (OTT) TV. Fransat and HD+ join UK’s Freesat in adopting ExpressPlay XCA, bringing Intertrust’s unique technology to three major European TV markets.

Built on the open-standard Marlin DRM engine, ExpressPlay XCA lets TV operators deliver content to set-top box (STB) or smart TV via DVB (digital video broadcasting) channels. Marlin DRM was created by a consortium led by Intertrust, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony. Fransat and HD+ have now joined other operators in the Free TV Alliance, a collaboration between the four major European free digital satellite television broadcasters to promote free satellite TV and the technology used in its broadcasts, in adopting XCA’s revolutionary capabilities.

Additionally, HiSense and TCL announced that they will provide smart TVs with XCA software for select 2020 models. Intertrust also announced that set-top box leader CommScope will provide hardware with embedded XCA security to television operators. These device leaders join Vestel and other TV majors which were announced earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas.

“Our partnerships with Fransat and HD+, and device makers around the globe, signal a changing convergence trend in the world of content protection and management as consumers expect a common experience between their devices, and broadcasters and operators seek to leverage the economic efficiencies that internet-based technologies provide,” said Talal G. Shamoon, CEO at Intertrust Technologies.

Intertrust designed XCA’s back-end services to operate in two modes, one using full CA services from Intertrust, and another that allows integration with third-party CA infrastructure. The former provides a full end-to-end solution, while the latter allows operator choice on services and devices.

Shamoon continued, “ExpressPlay XCA is the perfect security engine to provide this seamless experience and economic efficiency, delivering TV-everywhere services by bringing the security robustness, device availability and deployment flexibility of DRM to the conditional access world while meeting the broadcast industry’s traditional requirements for security and service.”

‘One-way’ broadcasters are increasingly deploying OTT services amid immense competitive pressure and declining subscriber rates for their traditional services. This has required that they manage two content protection solutions — CAS, which is used in legacy satellite and cable TV, and DRM which serves the OTT market — to cover digital broadcast as well as web-based streaming services. Managing both is expensive and inefficient, and becoming more uneconomical as DRM’s agility has expanded on-premise and in the cloud. ExpressPlay XCA solves these challenges with a disruptive, unified content-protection model.

Un-Conditional Access Ecosystem

Intertrust has developed a vibrant ecosystem around ExpressPlay XCA with the FreeTV Alliance which includes Fransat, HD+, Freesat, and Italy’s Tivu. In addition, a vast array of SoC (system on a chip) makers including Broadcom, MediaTek, RealTek, NovaTek, AmLogic, Alitech, and Montage now support ExpressPlay XCA, allowing broadcasters and TV operators to leverage a multitude of STB and smart TV manufacturers which have pre-integrated ExpressPlay-enabled chipsets into their products and components.

It also supports DVB broadcast-only devices, broadband and DVB-IP hybrid devices, bridging the CAS and DRM worlds with a single client security stack for broadcast and broadband services. Intertrust’s DRM solution provides a secure content-delivery framework for ExpressPlay XCA that leverages SoC-implemented security features such as trusted-execution environments (TEE) and secure video paths (SVP) for UHD content, and also supports forensic watermarking to offer the highest level of content protection for premium content distribution.

ExpressPlay XCA requires no dedicated hardware in devices or external modules such as smart cards and conditional access modules (CAM). With support for linear TV scenarios, IPTV platforms, cloud, on-premise and OTT services, it is an economical content protection solution that protects current services while offering the flexibility to quickly address the challenges of the cord-cutting future.

Intertrust also revealed today, at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam, that ExpressPlay XCA’s sister product, ExpressPlay DRM, has achieved a global milestone as it now protects the over-the-top TV content services for one-quarter of the world’s population.

Media and analysts can learn more about ExpressPlay XCA at IBC 2019 in Amsterdam which takes place at the RAI convention venue. Interested parties are invited to the Intertrust booth in Hall 5 (Booth 5.A55), or they can contact intertrust@sparkpr.com to arrange an online or in-person briefing and demo.

About Intertrust

Intertrust provides trusted computing products and services to leading global corporations – from mobile, CE and IoT manufacturers to service providers, and enterprise software platform companies. These products include the world’s leading digital rights management (DRM), software tamper resistance, and technologies to enable private data exchanges for various verticals including energy, entertainment, retail/marketing, automotive, fintech, and IoT. Founded in 1990, Intertrust is headquartered in Silicon Valley with regional offices in London, Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul, Riga, and Tallinn. The company has a legacy of invention, and its fundamental contributions in the areas of computer security and digital trust are globally recognized. Intertrust holds hundreds of patents that are key to Internet security, trust, and privacy management components of operating systems, trusted mobile code and networked operating environments, web services, and cloud computing.

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