NDS LAUNCHES METRO™ HIGH DEFINITION DIGITAL VIDEO RECORDER WITH AMINO; SES AMERICOM ANNOUNCED AS FIRST CUSTOMER

October 25, 2007

Source: NDS

NDS, the leading technology provider for digital pay-TV, today introduced its High Definition Digital Video Recorder, an Amino AmiNET530 Set-Top Box (STB) powered by Metro middleware, for the IPTV market - a first for the OpenCA industry. NDS Metro™ is an integrated IPTV middleware and conditional access solution that provides a complete end-to-end turnkey offering for telecommunications companies and broadband operators. The NDS HD DVR solution will be exhibited with live streaming of 100 video channels on an AmiNET530 in the NDS booth #214 at TelcoTV 2007.

SES AMERICOM, the only company delivering MPEG4 IPTV service to telcos in the US, is the first customer and will integrate the HD DVR solution into its IP-PRIME® IPTV solution for service providers.

"SES AMERICOM knows that HD is a major and increasingly larger factor in how consumers select their television service," said Walt Davis, product manager for IP-PRIME at SES AMERICOM. "We have designed an IPTV service that delivers the best HDTV picture quality, as proven in side-by-side comparisons. Offering a DVR that delivers the same HD quality in recorded programs as the viewer experiences when watching the live program, is an obvious next step in IP-PRIME's solution. SES AMERICOM is committed to ensuring that IP-PRIME enables service providers to offer their subscribers the best possible television experience, and NDS' innovative HD DVR solution will be a truly compelling application for subscribers."

"We are delighted to work with NDS to provide the advanced AmiNET530 DVR STB to a high profile customer such as SES AMERICOM, which offers a very attractive business proposition to the IPTV market," said Rick Sailor, VP Sales - Americas for Amino.

NDS will offer innovative revenue driving opportunities and features for telco and broadband operators by integrating its solution with the world-class Amino AmiNET530 interactive STB. At TelcoTV, NDS will demonstrate key elements of the advanced viewer experience for the first time, including one-touch recording, scheduling a recording through the electronic programming guide (EPG) and disk playback capabilities. The NDS Metro solution ensures that video content is protected at all times with the HD MPEG4 DVR, regardless of when it is recorded or played.

"In order to compete effectively, telcos must have a very strong DVR offering for their IPTV customers," said Dov Rubin, Vice President and General Manager, NDS Americas. "With that in mind, we have built an H.264 DVR featuring our Metro middleware and combined it with High Definition - providing IPTV leaders such as SES AMERICOM with a powerful and competitive product for their subscribers."

Along with working with standard definition (SD) content and MPEG-2, the NDS HD H.264 DVR also offers end-users enhanced imaging with HD content. The new features of this DVR include:

Electronic Programming Guide: Metro's consolidated, intuitive EPG gives users immediate access to video on demand (VOD) and archived content with a customizable and scalable viewing pane.

Time-Shifted HD Content: Viewers can play, record, fast forward or rewind their DVR'ed content while maintaining the HD quality of a live feed. And with Metro, the content being viewed is always securely protected.

Standards-based and Open: Metro is built with open software interfaces and is based on internationally recognized standards. It uses the latest video codecs, integrated into high definition decoder chips for bandwidth economy, keeping set-top box costs low. It also uses standards-based content protection technology, compliant with DVB SimulCrypt interfaces and use of AES standard encryption, to facilitate choice and interoperability with a wide range of hardware suppliers, thus driving down the total cost of IPTV deployment and ensuring faster and easier integrations.

My Planner and My TV: The viewer experience with the HD H.264 Metro DVR is based on the same Metro interface used for NDS' non-DVR product, with various enhancements such as a set of menu options for managing personal recordings and defining personalized DVR characteristics such as the viewing pane.

NDS Metro is part of the NDS MediaHighway middleware family of products, which is currently deployed around the world on more than 61 million set-top boxes. Metro also provides conditional access and digital rights management via NDS VideoGuard®, the most widely used conditional access solution in the world, currently protecting content on more than 75 million set-top boxes globally.

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