DD Freedish to acquire ByDesign’s CAS technology for MPEG4 expansion

Doordarshan’s free-to-air (FTA) direct to home (DTH) service Freedish is planning to acquire Bangalore based ByDesign India’s conditional access system (CAS) so as to increase its channel offerings to 112 from the current 64 .

Late last year, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) approved a proposal by ByDesign India to develop an Indian conditional access system. ByDesign was to receive a support amount of Rs 19.79 crore from DeitY to develop the new system in association with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

The ByDesign model is totally indigenous and built for DVB-C setup. This CAS solution will enable broadcasters to control access to their services by viewers, and thereby enabling them to extend their business models to subscription based schemes.

This will mean that the Freedish will become encrypted but will remain FTA. In addition to helping increase the number of channels on the platform, this will enable Freedish to gauge the exact number of households relying on Freedish as encrypted set top boxes (STBs) will only be available with authorised dealers.