Eurovision Services And Ateme Conduct First Test Of BISS-CA Audio Features

At a recent major sports event in France, Eurovision Services and Ateme carried out the first-ever test of enhanced features of the BISS-CA encryption standard that allow content owners to grant conditional access to individual audio feeds.

Although Eurovision Services has been using the BISS-CA standard for encrypting live event signals for over a year, this is the first time that the enhanced features allowing encryption of individual audio feeds have been tested in an 'as-live' context. To do so, Eurovision Services worked with Ateme on a separate, isolated encrypted live signal from a major sport event in France. The signal was encoded using an Ateme TITAN encoder, with separate encryptions for individual audio feeds, then routed exclusively to the Eurovision Services Network Operations Centre in Geneva, where Ateme TITAN and KYRION decoders descrambled and decoded the different multi-audio scenarios produced from the source.

Amine Hafnaoui, Head of Global Operations and Engineering at Eurovision Services, commented on the successful completion of the test: "The encryption of content is of paramount importance for content owners and sport federations and the preservation of an authentic broadcast signal is therefore a major pillar of our industry. In addition to encrypting a live video feed to protect its authenticity, audio content has now also become an important additional layer in this process. Therefore, partnering with Ateme was an obvious step for developing such an interesting feature for the market. Following this first test, we now have new possibilities for content owners to customise the distribution of their video and audio content.

"This is an exciting time for the media industry," said Julien Mandel, Senior Marketing Director on Contribution and Distribution at Ateme. "With these enhanced BISS-CA features, video service providers can now enable segmentation, offering more personalized services with opportunities for upselling. It has been a rewarding experience to make this happen and to innovate once again with Eurovision Services. And with BISS-CA having proved to be secure, interoperable, simple, and increasingly scalable – first in watermarking and now audio management – I look forward to seeing where it will take us next!"