Herve Creff, Director, Product Marketing, Interactive Applications, Canal Plus

"Demand for MHP is driven by high end set tops, but it is becoming a marginal cost. The market is differentiating between high end and low-end boxes as is becomes more developed, and we will have a high end and low end option available. When you are in the early development stages of a platform you want a low end solution with a low initial cost.

Creff explained that MHP is now a small part of the cost, and that the company is now getting pressure from the content, services and set top providers to deliver a standardised MHP compliant offer so that they can develop content once for cross platform usage. The service is offered by the operator - in this case by Canal Satellite - which is Creff says is neutral regarding the model of set top they will deploy.

The new box from Canal Plus Technologies uses two tuners so that users can view one channel while recording another - this is now seen as a key feature. It will also have a hard drive, and Internet access. Different models will offer additional features, such as the PVR capability. The technology will also be able to run on other advanced set top boxes using Java and MHP - and it's a modular system that can be upgraded."

Regarding the dispute with NDS, on May 30th there was a hearing in San Francisco which NDS sought to dismiss on legal grounds, and Canal Plus filed to object. Creff commented, "There is no new news but we stand firm in all our allegations." Canal Plus has been swapping out all its smart cards, whose security has been compromised, starting with Poland, then Italy during June, and all of Europe by the end of the year."

Although Canal Plus Technologies is best known in France, it is also active outside its home territories and parent company, supplying applications, Mosaic and conditional access to Astro Measat in Malaysia, which has a million subscribers; conditional access for Zee TV in India. Boxes have been deployed by Orbit throughout the Middle East. And in the US, Winfirst - an AT&T broadband over-builder, is working with Canal Plus Technologies on delivering the triple play (video, voice and data) over fibre optics, in a Java deployment to 'double digit thousands' of subscribers. VOD will also be deployed elsewhere when the bandwidth allows. Echostar is another 'very significant' customer in North America - about to become the largest satellite provider via the merger with DirecTV - again being supplied technology for advanced set top boxes by Canal Plus Technologies. North America is now a particular target area for growth, and though Asia is taking longer to adopt digitisation, it too is seen as a good growth market, while the maturing of the European market also offers opportunities.

Regarding interactive applications, Creff confirmed that the company has looked at new business models, eg with VOD, providing the service end to end, with the possibility of proposing revenue share options. Creff commented, "New innovative models can be created for companies where it makes sense for the operator to reduce set up costs and share revenues. One example of a revenue share deployment is a horse racing service in which Canal Plus Technologies has provided the billing structure and handles the financial aspects and so gets an incremental revenue share on 86,000 accounts.

In the last financial year the company reported revenues of E115 million. This year the company is launching new types of services, including MHP, PVR and Internet plus carried out the card swap, but these costs are now in the past."

While the emphasis remains upon satellite, Canal Plus technologies also supplies cable (such as the Winfirst in the US cited above), and is increasingly involved in digital terrestrial. Creff adds, "DTT offers a technology that works; (despite its ultimate collapse) ITV Digital recorded rapid growth. We are supplying the conditional access for CSJC Telemedium DTT service in St Petersburg in Russia, serving some five million residents, having signed the agreement February 14 for deployment this summer."

"For the future, we foresee that interactivity which was done by platform operators will increasingly be controlled by content providers - and it will be more than enhanced TV it will be interactive content. On that subject, we have teamed up with the TV production house 121 to develop interactive content targeting first generation set tops which has been massively deployed as of today. This will clearly demonstrate that there is still a lot of room for interactive applications to be developed and deployed in low end set top boxes."
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