The Open Authentication Technology Committee (OATC), a non-profit industry association of programmers/content owners, multi-channel video programme distributors (MVPDs), technology companies, and system integrators, has confirmed its Online Multimedia Authorization Protocol (OMAP) draft specification is now available for public comment and download. The OATC OMAP specification is a voluntary open standard that provides MVPDs and programmers […]

Civolution announces agreement with Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution, which will employ Civolution’s media monitoring service, Teletrax, to monitor the broadcast of its video content in the international marketplace. The media intelligence provided by Teletrax will allow Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution to accelerate rights windows for the overseas broadcast of its content, monitor on-air […]

NDS executives are not at all happy at the way events are unfolding. They are especially dismayed over negative implications in the London Independent newspaper concerning a £2,000 donation made 12 years ago to Surrey police to help fund a local ‘crimestoppers’ campaign has been misconstrued. NDS is demanding a full and unequivocal retraction from […]

Rupert Murdoch has hit back at reports that a News Corporation subsidiary was allegedly involved in piracy, undermining competitors within the nascent Australian pay-TV industry. The News Corp chief has used Twitter, accusing rival publications of “lies and libels” after the Australian Financial Review reported that Operational Security, established within News subsidiary NDS in the […]

In Australia, News Corp’s pay-TV platform Foxtel has denied any involvement in promoting piracy following allegations that a covert unit within NDS set out to sabotage rivals. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) had reported that a unit within News Corporation hacked smartcards of Austar  – a competitor to the partly News Corporation-owned Foxtel. The allegations […]

NDS has denied that Davide Rossi the fomer head of the AEPOC anti-piracy organisation and, it is now revealed, a consultant to the security department of NDS, ever acted illegally on their behalf. Rossi is currently a defendant in a wide-ranging pay-TV piracy trial in Sicily where several defendants are charged as part of a […]

In terms of revelations, Panorama provided not much that wasn’t already known, or assumed, in the NDS hacking saga: Criminals allege criminal behaviour in the inevitably very murky world of encryption, hacking and counter measures. NDS admit hacking – to test its rival’s technology – and it is accepted as standard practice. NDS strenuously denies […]