NDS Group
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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, PMPsand other devices has recently been displayed at CES and IBC.
As of 31 December 2007, there are more than 69.9 million active VideoGuard smart cards. NDS also makes the XTV PVR/DVR, which has been cumulatively deployed in more than 5.3 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), 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).
NDS continues to grow through new customer wins as well as acquisitions. It owns Orbis, a leading provider of online gaming technology and Jungo who provide smarter software for residential gateways.
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[edit] History and 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] Canal Plus lawsuit
NDS has in the past been accused of breaking other companies' satellite encryption schemes, and was involved in a lawsuit brought by Canal Plus. The lawsuit, filed on July 25 2003 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, alleged that NDS spent huge sums to break Canal Plus's conditional access technology and published the code on the internet which allowed fraudsters to manufacture counterfeit smart cards. The company filed an amended complaint on October 9; however, this was dismissed. Other legal action was being pursued as late as August 2005.
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 France Telecom 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. 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]
[edit] Tax Evasion
NDS was investigated in 1996 for tax evasion in Israel. NDS offices were raided in October 1996 amid allegations of tens of millions of dollars of unpaid tax.
[edit] External links
- NDS Website
- Details of Canal Plus lawsuit
- Guardian story in which the accusations against NDS first surfaced
- Observer interview with Abe Peled
- Article on alleged tax evasion by NDS
- Australian Financial Review article on Canal Plus lawsuit and history of NDS
- Profile of Shafran Ltd. on Israeli government website
