Interoperable conditional access with video selective encryption for portable devices

The pay-TV industry seeks to extend its reach to portable display devices. At the same time, it seeks to ensure a horizontal market by making interoperable the Conditional Access Systems (CASs) employed to protect content. To achieve interoperability for such devices, this paper proposes a form of selective encryption for video that allows simultaneous distribution of a small percentage of video data on a per-CAS basis, allowing sharing of the unencrypted video between the CASs. The bitrate overhead for each additional CAS enabled is found to be on average 7.41 %, whereas the computational overhead amounts to no more than 40 ms for the benchmark sequences tested. Adaptation of CAS to transparent encryption of scalable video is also demonstrated in this paper.