While broadcasters, MSOs, cable ops and consumers grapple the possibilities and frailties of CAS in India, set top box (STB) manufacturers are dealing with the more practical aspects of the system.

DALVI, a six-year-old encryption systems company that's looking to be a major player in the conditional access market in the country, is one such. The company that has been in talks with MSOs and cable ops for the last two years has already migrated from having a linear power supply to a switch mode power supply in order to cater for voltage variation within India. The company has also had to develop and deploy a fingerprinting functionality to help combat the use of illegal signals being transmitted throughout the country, says DALVI's business development manager Lewis Zimbler. This functionality enables the operator to make any decoder transmit a number on the TVs that it is feeding signals to, he says.

The company has tied up with Catvision Products for distribution and is already in discussions with partners for setting up its own STB manufacturing facility in India, Zimbler says.

Manufacturers also have to reduce prices to enable them to compete in the Indian marketplace, by using strategic Indian partners and using Indian manufacture. While DALVI currently operates only for analogue systems, digital systems are also being simultaneously developed, says Zimbler.

Queried on the price, the talk around which has ranged between Rs 2000 - Rs 7000, Zimbler would offer no clear fix on it except to say his prices would be competitive. Factors that have a role to play in this are import duties and how the decoders will get to the subscribers, he says.

Elaborating on the advantages his product offers, Zimbler says DALVI system encoders can readily interface with standard video modulators used in SMATV, CATV, VHF/UHF and MMDS so making upgrading to DALVI simpler.

The DALVI system uses an in-band addressing system such that a single head end can service any form of RF network, i.e., terrestrial, HFC, Coax, MMDS and Satellite or a combination of any transmission media. This means that an operator can have total control from a single location for a variety of networks. The system caters for 99 scrambled channels, offers 48 tiers, can control any number of headends from a single location and supports Pay Per View.

According to Zimbler, single networks of over 1,000,000 subscribers can be combined without any difficulty, likewise smaller networks of only a few subscribers can also be handled with the same degree of functionality and control.

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