Access control requirements in a mature pay television industry

In the United States, satellite delivered pay TV is in a very mature stage in many respects, driven heavily by the significant cable penetration which is providing signals to over 60 million TV households today. In analyzing the requirements of the US market, much can be extrapolated to other markets as they enter their phase of maturity. Due to the wide coverage of satellite distribution, scrambling technology is used for security. This security may be characterised by various components including: the mechanism used to scramble or encipher the video and audio components of the TV signal using pseudorandom data; the difficulty in predicting this pseudorandom data based on previous data; the generation and management of keys which initialize this pseudorandom data sequence; the distribution of keys to subscribers; and the storage and use of these keys in the subscriber's decoder.<>