What Ever Happened to DCAS?
A solution looking for industry buyer.

By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

Created: April 22, 2008

DCAS is defined as a downloadable conditional access system that includes a secure microchip versus using either proprietary conditional access or CableCARDs. Since its inception around 2000, DCAS has received great interest from cable industry as a means to pry open its traditionally proprietary dominated conditional access (CA) solutions. In fact, Brian Dietz of NCTA was quoted as saying, “we expect downloadable security to be supported nationwide by MSOs by July 2008.” Although the economic savings of implementing DCAS is virtually a no brainer ($50-90 per STB), technology hurdles of DCAS have been cleared, a reasonable question would be, “Why haven’t MSO’s deployed DCAS?” Has the fact that FCC’s mandate for separable security has passed thus reducing MSO interest in DCAS or is there something else standing in the way?

History of Conditional Access Choices

Among larger US cable systems, use of the proprietary CA systems such as Motorola’s DigiCipher II or Cisco’s (Scientific Atlanta) PowerKEY is most common. There have been a handful of exceptions to this trend. In the late 1990s MediaOne deployed an open cable system using several different vendors including a CA system from Canal+ (now Nagravision) in Jaxsonville, FL and Roseville, MN. While not a completely open system, they represented a radical change from cable relying on more traditional single vendor solutions from one of the big two. However, as these open systems grew closer and closer to operating reliably and efficiently, a ‘business decision’ was made to pull the plug and swap out these systems for Motorola’s digital video solution. Years later, the word on the street was that Motorola paid as much as $1 million per headend to pull the plug on these open cable threats as near term cost reductions became more important to cable companies (like MediaOne) than longer term strategic interests like demanding an open, competitive conditional access system.

Around the same time as the MediaOne deployments several other CA options were being proposed (and or developed) including: Harmony, Passage, Open CAS, and CableCARD. Of these, CableCARD was the only option which seemed to address a particular need by Motorola that both the descrambler and key exchanger exist on the same chip. Today, a number of industry professionals express concerns that as big as the cable industry has become, unlike any other industry of its size it is still being throttled by the likes of two vendors that maintain a dominate role in its current and future success. While cable attempts to defrag its industry it’s faced with competition that often has lower cost equipment due to conscious business decisions to purchase standards based equipment which breeds competition.

DCAS Competition

Trying to find people who would openly talk about DCAS has proven to be an impossible task. The subject of DCAS has become ultra sensitive, highly political, and as one person put it, “A lightning rod at the regulatory level” so many details were hard to come by. While competition for DCAS appears to be a race among the 9 vendors claiming to have solutions (see Table 1.0), sources close to the subject describe the actual progress as extremely slow, if not non existent.

Table 1.0 Breakdown of Available DCAS Solutions

None of the solutions in Table 1.0 address ‘all’ the needs expressed in the original DCAS requirements which include: secure micro, scalability, and middleware – rather they may meet one of the three or in some cases two, but none meet all three. PolyCipher in particular has been plagued with impossible obstacles largely the result of its self imposed dependency on Motorola and Cisco. The company has spent upwards of $50 million to date, lost full support of all its members, closed its office in Denver, and sold off all its equipment. The downfall of PolyCipher centers around the refusal by Motorola to support its release of DCAS 1.0 which lead to follow on development of a much more involved DCAS 2.0. Only DCAS 2.0 ended up being 5 times more expensive ($10-20 versus $2-3 per chip) and upped the processing power requirement by 1 order of magnitude. Some say Motorola knew as early as July 2005 that DCAS 1.0 wasn’t going to work, but waited until mid 2007 before it objected to DCAS 1.0 saying it would refuse to indemnify both past and future CA if DCAS 1.0 was implemented. Interestingly, Cisco and Motorola have since introduced new forward compatible DCAS solutions to go along with their existing highly lucrative CA/CableCARD solutions which no doubt will come at an attractive price point versus integrating with first generation new (or open) CA vendor.

Summary

Since DCAS didn’t deliver the desired relief (waver from the FCC) that cable was hoping for, will the $50 savings per STB be enough for cable to follow through with DCAS? Some say that since the cable industry invented the CableCARD, its availability provided the FCC with a convenient way to reject requests for more time to implement DCAS. Now that FCC decision is in the past, does DCAS have enough benefits and cost savings beyond a waver to get deployed? While logical reasoning would say yes, the ultimate decision is still left up to the cable industry as those initial DCAS deployments will be much more costly than what Cisco and Motorola will be pitching. We will have to see whether competitive open CA systems rather than near term cost savings wins out on this time around.

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