Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Widevine Supplies Virtual Smart Cards for Chunghwa Telecom's IPTV

Taiwan's ChungHwa Telecom has ordered an additional 500,000 downloadable Virtual Smart Cards from Widevine Technologies. ChungHwa Telecom is using Widevine Cypher, a conditional access and digital rights management solution.


Chunghwa's Multimedia on Demand (MOD) project, one of the largest IPTV deployments in the world, offers True Video-on-Demand (TVOD), Near VOD (NVOD), Karaoke-on-Demand and linear broadcast channels. The MOD expansion project will add another 500,000 subscribers to the current MOD subscriber base. The expansion project will feature two additional head ends. For the project, Widevine will deploy with two middleware providers -- Orca and Alcatel -- and four set-top boxes from three manufacturers: Pace, Foxcom and Hwacom/Setabox.


ChungHwa Telecom has licensed Widevine Cypher from Mediascape, Widevine's distributor in Taiwan. Widevine will be paid an upfront licensing fee plus an additional per-subscriber fee as the install base increases over the years.



http://www.widevine.com

  • In January 2005, Alcatel and Widevine announced a global agreement for Alcatel to resell Widevine Technologies' Cypher technology-Virtual SmartCard and Application Level encryption for securing content over video networks. The Widevine Virtual SmartCard solution is currently used a content security solution in the TVoDSL and FTTH markets. The companies cited Chunghwa Telecom's rollout as the catalyst for their agreement.

  • Chunghwa Telecom, the incumbent operator in Taiwan, had 3.1 million ADSL users as of 31-Dec 31, 2004, a 26.6% YoY increase