During a recent sporting event in France, Eurovision Services and Ateme joined forces on the first-ever trial of enhanced features of the BISS-CA encryption standard, which allow content owners to grant conditional access to individual audio feeds.
Eurovision Services has been using the standard for over a year, but the trial was the first time its enhanced features that enable users to encrypt individual audio feeds was tested in an “as live” context.
The company worked with Ateme on a separate, isolated encrypted live signal that was encoded using an Ateme TITAN encoder, then routed exclusively to the Eurovision Services Network Operations Centre in Geneva, where Ateme TITAN and KYRION decoders descrambled and decoded the different multi-audio scenarios produced from the source.
“The encryption of content is of paramount importance for content owners and sport federations and the preservation of an authentic broadcast signal is therefore a major pillar of our industry,” said Amine Hafnaoui, head of global operations and engineering at Eurovision Services.
“In addition to encrypting a live video feed to protect its authenticity, audio content has now also become an important additional layer in this process. Therefore, partnering with Ateme was an obvious step for developing such an interesting feature for the market. Following this first test, we now have new possibilities for content owners to customise the distribution of their video and audio content.”
Julien Mandel, senior marketing director on contribution and distribution at Ateme added: “With these enhanced BISS-CA features, video service providers can now enable segmentation, offering more personalised services with opportunities for upselling. It has been a rewarding experience to make this happen and to innovate once again with Eurovision Services. And with BISS-CA having proved to be secure, interoperable, simple, and increasingly scalable – first in watermarking and now audio management – I look forward to seeing where it will take us next!”
