With the amendment bill which would have introduced conditional cable access withdrawn from the Rajya Sabha last week, and with cable operators in Delhi are threatening a blackout, cable TV reform remains contentious
James Gordon
New Media Consultant
The ¿Cable
Television Networks (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2002¿ which will amend the
principal Cable Act of 1995 and introduce the Conditional Access System (CAS)
has already been passed in the Lok Sabha in May 2002, after a three hour
debate. The bill was withdrawn from the Rajya Sabha last week but could be
introduced again this week (22 July 2002). A House Select Committee was
requested by M. Kapil Sibal (Congress) on the grounds of conflicting interests,
but the demand has not yet been conceded.
Even as
the broadcast industry has alleged that the analogue set top box, central to
the CAS rollout, can easily be tampered with and hence the issue of piracy of
signals cannot be addressed through the present CAS system, cable operators in
Delhi are threatening a cable blackout if CAS is not introduced soon. While
regulation is imminent, several aspects of conditional access need to be
understood.
Piracy
It is indeed true that encryption for CAS has encountered severe hacking
throughout the television world in the last six months. Major systems belonging
to Rupert Murdoch and Canal Plus have been hacked, and not only in the USA and
UK.
"Conditional Access" means "pay", which means
"encryption" (or scrambling), with "de-scrambling" for
those who have paid. Millions of dollars of television programming has been
"stolen" thanks to the hacking of smart cards used by the major
broadcasters for analogue CAS. The codes necessary for "breaking"
these systems have been posted on the Internet.
Pay
systems such as "iTV DIGITAL" in the UK (1 million homes using the
Canal Plus, ¿Mediaguard¿ SECA technology) have gone bankrupt. Canal Plus
Technologies makes smart cards for more than 12.5 million set-top boxes around
the world.
Murdoch¿s News Corp owns 79.2% of NDS, a company which provides smart cards for
- amongst others - Direct-TV in the USA and BSKYB in the UK. NDS¿ Videoguard
has also been hacked (see The Guardian (UK). Direct-tv is having to replace 10
million cards at a cost of $100 million, according to the New York Post. The
¿reverse engineering¿ process necessary to break these codes have been posted
on the Internet.
Those responsible for the publishing of such codes are alleged to be competitor pay systems who paid hackers to discover the codes and publish them. (e.g. NDS publishes C+ codes). Canal Plus is asking for a Jury Trial, and damages of US$3 billion, in a California court where News Corp has been formally charged. Canal Plus claims that their codes were hacked by an NDS owned laboratory near Haifa, in Israel then posted on the net.