NDS Group
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| NDS Group | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public (NASDAQ: [1]) |
| Founded | Late 1980s |
| Headquarters |  West Drayton (near Heathrow United Kingdom |
| Key people | Dr. Abe Peled, CEO |
| Products | Condiional Access/DRM Videoguard Middleware - MediaHighway Broadband IPTV Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) Mobile Interactive TV |
| Revenue | ▲ $709 million USD (2007) |
| Operating income | ▲ $160 million USD (2007) |
| Employees | 3,572 as at 6/2007 (>2,900 technical) |
| Website | www.nds.com |
Other statistics: (03/2007) Middleware 61.8 million (cumulative) Digital Video Recorders 7.3 million (cumulative) Residential Gateways 2.7 million (cumulative) |
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NDS Group plc is a DRM and conditional access firm. It is listed on the NASDAQ (symbol NNDS), but its major shareholder is News Corporation. The company is headquartered in West Drayton (near Heathrow), United Kingdom. The CEO of NDS is Abe Peled.
Its major product is the VideoGuard conditional access system, which is used on most of News Corporation's digital satellite TV systems. It is also used on many non-News Corp systems. In addition, VideoGuard is used in broadband IPTV, mobile solutions and cable. New solutions to secure content on PCs, PMPs and other devices have recently been displayed at CES and IBC.
As of 31 March 2007, there are more than 70 million active VideoGuard smart cards. NDS also makes the XTV PVR/DVR, which has been cumulatively deployed in more than 6.5 million set-top boxes. XTV is more commonly identifiable under the names Sky+ (in BSkyB) and DirecTV+ (in DirecTV). NDS has deployed or activated more than 50 million set-top boxes with its MediaHighway middleware.
NDS also supplies interactive TV applications, platforms, and development tools. NDS has over 3000 employees, with offices in the UK, Israel, United States, France, India, Denmark, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Australia.
Leading customers include DirecTV (in the USA), BSkyB, Sky Italia, SKY Latin America, SKY Network Television (in New Zealand), Viasat (in Sweden & Denmark), Foxtel (in Australia), China Central Television (CCTV), Yes and Hot (in Israel), SkyLife, CanalSat (in France), Astro (in Malaysia), Cablevision (in Canada) and Tata Sky (in India).
Contents |
[edit] Company Profile and History
[edit] Company Name
The company started out as News Datacom (NDC) in 1989, and later changed its name to News Digital Systems, hence its current name.
[edit] Management
Abe Peled is Chairman and CEO of NDS. He leads a team of executives located at the company's R & D and sales offices worldwide.
[edit] Subsidiaries
NDS owns Orbis, a leading provider of online gambling technology, Jungo who provide software for residential gateways and CastUp inc. a leader in providing comprehensive solutions for rich media production, publishing and distribution in today's most popular formats.
[edit] Piracy
NDS has in the past been accused of breaking other companies' satellite encryption schemes.
[edit] Canal Plus lawsuit
The Guardian, an independent UK broadsheet newspaper, broke the story with accusations that the NDS laboratory in Haifa, Israel had been working on breaking the SECA produced MediaGuard smartcards used by Canal+, ITV Digital and other non-Murdoch owned TV companies throughout Europe. In the front-page story, the Guardian accused NDS of deliberately extracting the UserROM code from the MediaGuard cards and then leaking it onto the internet.[1] The theory was lent credibility by the fact that extraction of the code from the cards would have required extremely specialized knowledge and expensive equipment — specifically, a scanning electron microscope. SEMs are tracked and controlled, and thus obtaining them without leaving a paper trail is difficult.[citation needed]
Canal Plus brought a $3billion lawsuit against NDS. Canal Plus later dropped the action when News Corporation agreed to buy Canal Plus's, struggling and heavily pirated Italian operation Telepiu[2][3].
[edit] Echostar lawsuit
Echostar sued NDS for $1 Billion for piracy and copyright infringement of the Echostar Viewing card codes and for aiding the distribution and supply of pirate Echostar viewing cards for the Echostar owned Dish TV. On 2008-05-15 a jury in California cleared NDS on most charges, awarding $1,500 for a single test case.[4]
Recently, ex-employee Christopher Tarnovsky, owner of Flylogic Engineering, spoke at the Blackhat 2008 security conferences [5], where he demonstrated such equipment such as SEMs and FIBs were not necesary to break smartcards as previously thought[citation needed]. The complaints from Canal+/Echostar alleged that their technology could only be broken by one of five labs in the world[citation needed]. However, many universities and all semiconductor fabs have this kind of equipment[citation needed].
[edit] Tax Evasion
NDS's offices in Israel were raided October 1996 after allegations of tax evasion were made. NDS later made a $3m "no blame" settlement with the Israeli tax authorities.[6]
[edit] References
- ^ Cassy, John; Paul Murphy. "How codebreakers cracked the secrets of the smart card", The Guardian, 2002-03-13. Retrieved on 2008-02-25.
- ^ "Vivendi settles row with NDS", The Guardian, 2003-05-02. Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
- ^ Tryhorn, Chris. "Murdoch lines up Sky Italia", The Guardian, 2002-04-30. Retrieved on 2008-05-20.
- ^ "News Corp unit cleared of piracy in DISH suit", Reuters. Retrieved on 2008-05-15.
- ^ http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-08/Tarnovsky/Presentation/bh-dc-08-tarnovsky.pdf
- ^ Chenoweth, Neil. "Breaking the pay-TV code-breakers", The Australian Financial Review, 2002-04-15.
[edit] External links
- NDS Website
- NDS rejects Nagrastar claims & lawsuit
- Murdoch firm ordered to hand over documents in TV piracy row
- NDS faces probe over TV hacking allegations
- NDS said to have paid cash to piracy site - Email 'evidence' links News Corp. to ITV pirates
- Details of Canal Plus lawsuit
- All Canal+ Lawsuit documents
- CANAL+ GROUP FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST NDS TO RECOVER FOR ACTS OF UNFAIR COMPETITION
- Canal+ Technologies Press releases
- Newspapers - The Guardian / Le Figaro / Les Echos / Le Monde
- Murdoch security chief linked to TV piracy site
- Murdoch Security Chief Linked to Anti-Competitive Actions
- Messier mire for Murdochs
- Observer interview with Abe Peled
- Australian Financial Review article on Canal Plus lawsuit and history of NDS
- Profile of Shafran Ltd. on Israeli government website
