NDS, the London, England based provider of encryption technology for TV broadcasters announced yesterday it has used its technology to produce encryption products for the internet. The company said its CastGear product is designed for corporations – broadcasters, content providers and ISPs that want to send secure, encrypted data to multiple users simultaneously (multicasting). As opposed to other products that don’t allow companies to see who’s viewing the content or how long they are viewing it for, NDS says its CastGear software enables organizations to manage their multicasts by gathering data about the users which can then be used to bill them according to how long they viewed the particular content.
By contrast, AccessGear offers security for point to point broadcasting of data, for example, as would be required for home banking or any transaction based web interaction. Security is ensured, NDS says, by using special encryption/decryption keys, which are constantly being changed every tenth of a second to ensure hackers can’t get into the system. The client software for both AccessGear and CastGear is available by download from the internet or on a smart card. The software, which falls under NDS’s SecureGear family of web- based encryption products, will be officially launched at the Network+Interop trade show in May and products will start shipping in the third quarter.
