"Green" Solutions

Irdeto is committed to environmental responsibility, and this commitment drives us to always look for innovative ways to deliver “greener” solutions to the market.

In fact, Irdeto supports the European Union's voluntary agreement on energy saving, in addition to the voluntary agreements in the U.S. and Australia. Irdeto also participates actively in industry forums to further the energy saving cause, and offers a sound strategy and practical approach to help our customers become "green" with both new and existing deployments.

Irdeto Cloaked CA, a greener way to protect pay TV

One great example of Irdeto's green initiative is Irdeto Cloaked CA, an innovative card-less software security solution that delivers the same level of uncompromising security as a smart card, for protecting digital TV content. Smart cards, commonly used in pay TV and other security-critical industries, are built from layers of plastic, electronic components, copper and gold among other materials. Many toxic substances such as glues and solvents are used in the production, assembling and packaging of smart cards, and transporting cards between locations and distributing them to end users also require significant logistical efforts and resources, and produce waste.

All this leads to a significant amount of energy usage and waste, which clearly has a negative impact on the environment and incurs costs for operators. While Irdeto's strategy has always been to help operators renew security over the air on deployed smart cards to keep them in the field for as long as possible, it is common in the pay TV industry for conditional access (CA) providers to leverage card swaps as a way to update security. Irdeto estimated that more than 78 million cards were swapped globally by pay TV operators in 2011, and as many as HALF A BILLION cards would be swapped from 2011 to 2015. As a smart card weighs six grams each, the estimated number of swapped cards in five years represents nearly 3500 tons of waste — comparable to 300 mature elephants!

Committed to security, environmentally conscious

As a cardless solution, Cloaked CA eliminates the energy and waste associated with smart card production, distribution and disposal. Being "green" does not mean any compromises on the "cool factor", either, as security updates, new features and functionalities for Cloaked CA can be easily downloaded over the air to the device on both one-way and two-way networks.

With Cloaked CA, Irdeto fully redefines the traditional pay TV security approach, significantly reducing the carbon footprint compared to a smart card solution. See how pay TV operators such as Stofa and Mega Media are using Cloaked CA, Irdeto's fully renewable, software-based conditional access solution, to ensure uncompromising security for their pay TV services.