By Graham S. Stubbs, OAK Communications Inc.
The shift towards increased revenue generation from basic services (and a corresponding decrease in multi-tier pay revenues) strengthens the need for means to protect those basic services from signal piracy. In the past, scrambling and addressability have been used primarily to protect pay services. Now there is clearly a need for a cost effective method to secure basic channels without rendering existing equipment, especially plain converters, obsolete.
This paper discusses converter compatible solutions to the problem, and describes two specific examples, each of which is capable of being overlaid on an existing system already equipped with converters.
The more secure of the approaches described applies encryption technology to provide a very high degree of security. The other approach is an add-on decoder, examples of which have been available for some time.