DeitY helps Indian Company to develop conditional access system technology for set top boxes

NEW DELHI: Funded by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) for promotion of Electronics design and manufacturing in the country, ByDesign India of Bangalore has successfully completed development of Conditional Access System (CAS) for Set Top Boxes (STBs) under a project.

The development of CAS by ByDesign has enabled India to enter a niche market hitherto dominated by five big global companies. The global STB market is estimated to be about 250 Million STBs per annum and the CAS market is expected to be nearly USD 2 Billion per annum. The projected demand in India for completing the digitization of broadcasting network is nearly 100 Million STBs, thereby signifying an attractive domestic market.

ByDesign India Bangalore, was selected and awarded the task for development and implementation of Indian Conditional Access System (iCASTM) in association with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in November, 2014 with technical specifications that were the best in the world. C-DAC was responsible for design review, code review, monitoring, testing and validation of the entire project. The Development Stage of iCASTM was successfully completed on 14.11.2015 within specified time.

The developed iCASTM already supports 7 Indian Languages and shall support 15 more languages in near future. The iCASTM is tested at the Cryptography Verification Labs, accredited by NIST, USA, and has also been widely field tested in Indian conditions.

ByDesign is required to tie up with at least 5 Operators and install STB with iCASTM in atleast 2,50,000 STBs. The implementation of iCASTM in the cable networks has already started. More than 25,000 STBs with iCASTM have already been deployed across the country in last 2 months, from Haldwani in the North to Madurai in the South and Durgapur in the East to Satara District in the West.

iCASTM exemplifies successful collaboration between industry and Government for R&D and IPR generation in Electronics design and manufacturing. The iCASTM is also beneficial to domestic STB manufacturers because it is available to them at a price of USD 0.5/ license for a period of three years as against market price of USD 4-5/ license for other competing products.