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–Opens Customer Support Office in Munich
Interactive TV and conditional access technology provider, NDS, has generated a fair amount of news over the past few weeks:

Gateway Broadcast Services (GBS), a pan-African pay-TV operator that bills itself as offering a service that is affordable by middle-class Africans, has selected the company’s MediaHighway middleware and its EPG for its satellite TV service, branded GTV. The service has used NDS’s VideoGuard conditional access technology since its launch in mid-2007. Under the terms of the new deal, the MediaHighway middleware and EPG will be installed in all new GTV set-top boxes, and will also be downloaded to all the service’s existing set-tops in a phased upgrade, scheduled to begin in the fall. According to NDS, its technology will allow GBS to offer a common look-and-feel across all GTV set-tops, will improve the efficiency of the operator’s set-top box maintenance and customer- care operations, and will enable it to offer advanced services in the future. “We’re pleased to be broadening our relationship with GBS, a company that is revolutionizing TV viewing in sub-Saharan Africa,” NDS regional sales manager, Jon Bannerjee, said in a prepared statement. “This new agreement will allow GBS to efficiently deploy the MediaHighway middleware and EPG to new set-top boxes and upgrade existing set-top boxes over-the-air, significantly widening the possibilities for strengthening its brand identity and improving the overall subscriber experience.”
Pay-TV service, SKY New Zealand, which already uses NDS’s VideoGuard technology, has selected the company’s XTV DVR technology to power its new MYSKY HDi high-definition, quad- tuner PVR service. The deal also saw NDS providing an enhanced EPG for the service and managing systems integration for the launch of SKY’s HD service (note: the MYSKY HDi service, which currently offers five MPEG-4-encoded HDTV channels, launched July 29th). According to the companies, the MYSKY HDi DVR is SD-compatible, and allows viewers to record two shows simultaneously while watching a third one live, as well as letting them receive VOD content. The DVR employs the same NDS technology as Australian pay-TV provider Foxtel’s new iQ2 DVR (see below): the two pay-TV operators collaborated on the design and deployment of their PVR services, in order to accelerate time- to-market. SKY New Zealand says that it plans to deploy at least 80,000 MYSKY HDi DVR’s over the next 12 months. The box features hybrid satellite and IP support, so as to allow SKY New Zealand to offer supplemental downloadable content over a broadband connection. NDS claims that its PVR technology has been deployed in over 12.1 million set-top boxes around the world.
The company’s deal with Foxtel, that sees the latter using its XTV PVR technology to power its new iQ2 HD quad-tuner PVR service (note: the deployment sees the XTV technology working in tandem with OpenTV’s PVR software–see articles in this issue), also sees it providing Foxtel with an EPG. In addition, NDS served as the systems integrator for the launch of Foxtel’s new HD+ service. According to Foxtel, since it launched the iQ2 DVR in June, over 20,000 of its its customers have upgraded to HD+ and the iQ2 DVR. “The launch of Foxtel iQ2 would not have been possible without NDS’s market-leading XTV technology and unrivalled systems-integration expertise,” Foxtel’s director of engineering, Peter Smart, said in a prepared statement. The new iQ2 PVR service is based on a hardware platform from Pace, that offers a 320GB hard drive and an HDMI connection (note: for more on the Pace hardware behind the service, see article in this issue).
Korean satellite-TV provider, SkyLife, has chosen the company’s VideoGuard conditional access technology and its MediaHighway middleware for its new HDTV service, which is the first H.264-based HD service in Korea. SkyLife has been an NDS customer since the launch of its pay-TV service in March 2001: in addition to using the company’s conditional access and middleware technologies, it has deployed its EPG and its PVR platform. NDS’s middleware enables SkyLife to offer an MHP-based interactive TV service called Sky Touch, which features 36 separate applications, including games, interactive educational programming, TV banking and tcommerce. The new SkyLife HD service offers a range of HD content from such broadcasters as Discovery HD, NHK, and VOOM HD.
The company says that Russian media company, Sistema Mass Media (SMM), has selected its NDS Unified Headend technology to manage and protect TV content delivery to end-users over both IP and mobile networks. The company bills the NDS Unified Headend as integrating conditional access, digital rights management and third-party applications, in order to enable operators to deliver secure broadcast and VOD services to a range of devices, including set-top boxes, mobile phones, PC’s, portable media players and DVR’s. It says that the technology will enable SMM to use a single system to control content distribution to set-tops, PC’s and mobiles. Through its subsidiary, Digital Teleradiobroadcasting, SMM plans to launch a DVB-H mobile TV service that will be secured by NDS’s VideoGuard Mobile solution. The service will debut in Moscow, and will then be deployed in 16 other Russian cities that have populations of over a million. SMM claims that the service will be available to all Russian mobile customers, regardless of their carrier. “Only NDS was able to provide us with a complete and cost-effective solution that enables us to offer truly converged services to our customers,” SMM deputy CEO, Vitaly Shub, said in a prepared statement. “NDS not only provides the flexibility to combine multiple platforms for a single management view of operations, but it also gives us the opportunity to offer new advanced services in the future.” The company has opened a new customer support office in Munich. Its customers in Germany include Premiere, Kabel BW, Arcor and Tele Columbus. The new office will be headed up by Yves Padrines, who will hold the title VP of business development and general manager of NDS GmbH. In addition to providing customer support, the new office will have an in-house research-and-development team that will focus on the requirements of the German pay-TV market.