Cisco Systems Inc. and Canadian telco TELUS have invested in content security company Widevine Technologies Inc.
Widevine’s Series C strategic round, worth a total of $16 million, also included follow-on investment from VantagePoint, Bear Stearns Constellation Ventures, Pacesetter Capital and Phoenix Partners. The breakdown of which companies contributed what amounts was not disclosed.
Cisco said it invested in Widevine Technologies because of its leadership position in the content protection and digital forensics market and for its open solutions platform approach. Widevine has more than 90 telco, cable, satellite and Internet service operator customers.
“When we looked at the overall market for content protection it became clear that Widevine was by far the most advanced vendor in the space,” said Mathew George, vice president for TELUS Ventures. “Widevine provides TELUS with maximum flexibility with a proven solution spanning our technical and business requirements for wireline and wireless services. We believe Widevine is the right choice not only for TELUS, but for all other telecommunications operators looking to deliver entertainment content--which creates an exciting investment opportunity.”
Widevine’s content security technology is an important component in delivering IPTV services in locales from Utah to Taiwan and beyond.
According to a December 2004 study by ABI Research, Widevine is the leader in conditional access for telco/IP platforms, ahead of such venerable legacy video infrastructure vendors as Irdeto Access, Motorola Inc., Nagravision, NDS Ltd. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc. Conditional access competitors Irdeto Access, Nagravision and NDS supply equipment mostly to satellite operators, while Widevine at that time had close to 80 percent of the content security market for IPTV.
Widevine counts Taiwan’s state-owned ChungHwa Telecom Co. Ltd., which has one of the largest IPTV deployments in the world, as one of its customers. The company also has announced contracts with Arvig Communications of Detroit Lakes, Minn.; SaskTel of Canada; UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency); and others.
The company further provides equipment to two of the three largest independent telcos in North America and is working with all of the RBOCs. Widevine’s technology is interoperable with Microsoft’s IPTV solution, which the RBOCs have embraced.
Shortly after it was founded in 1999, Widevine began working with major movie studios and determined there was a significant disconnect between carrier and studio requirements related to content security, so the company spent the next three years designing solutions for conditional access/digital rights management.
The company today sells key management, which allows individuals to get access to content to which they have subscribed, and supplies an encryption product for on-demand content that meets demands of broadcasters and studios.
The Widevine Cypher Suite and implementation services enable operators to obtain premium on-demand titles. Cypher Suite contains patent-pending technologies for VoD (Cypher VOD), digital broadcast (Cypher Broadcast), conditional access/digital rights management (Cypher CA) and Digital Copy Protection (Cypher DCP).
Widevine also is credited with inventing the Virtual SmartCard, downloadable security software within a set-top box that can be replaced remotely by the service provider. This technology is important because the Virtual SmartCard can be replaced instantly and at no cost to the operator in the event of a security breach, whereas replacing a physical card is in excess of $20 per subscriber.
Several equipment vendors use Widevine’s security solutions in their products.
For example, Amino Communications, a provider of small, low-cost, high functionality set-top boxes for IPTV, secures its AmiNET500 PVR set-top boxes with the Cypher Virtual SmartCard from Widevine.
Widevine also has partnerships with Alcatel and Motorola, two of the key infrastructure vendors for the RBOC FTTx builds.
Alcatel has a partnership with Widevine to sell, service and support the Widevine Virtual SmartCard and Application Level encryption on a global basis.
Motorola has integrated the Widevine Virtual SmartCard and Application Level encryption on the company’s Multi-Service Access Platform for video over xDSL and fiber. The integrated video solution is marketed jointly by Widevine and Motorola. The Motorola Multi-Service Access platform currently delivers digital video to more than 90 percent of today’s North American installed base of telco TV services.
Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com
TELUS www.telus.com
Widevine Technologies Inc. www.widevine.com
