Widevine Technologies has enhanced its Cypher offering, enabling traditional TV services to be securely delivered directly to major PC players.

The enhancement converts MPEG-2 transport streams (TS) on a PC so that they are recognizable by Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and RealNetworks RealPlayer. This allows video operators to securely deliver standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) pay-TV content to a PC without the need for special connectors, headend equipment or custom PC player software, Widevine said.

With Cypher, video operators can use common Web technologies to customize a browser-based user TV experience. And video subscribers can consume existing linear broadcast, or multicast, and video-on-demand, or unicast, services on Windows, Linux and Mac-based computers and mobile devices.

"Initial attempts to expand in-home networks to PCs were limited by legacy conditional access systems and a lack of support for device native media players," said Glenn Morten, CTO at Widevine. "The media transport proxy bundled with Widevine Cypher enables operators to gain significant reach in terms of device footprint using popular players running on most PC and mobile platforms in the world today."

The Cypher PC client watermarks content as it decrypts, then monitors and responds to the hundreds of software and hardware tools that are used to pirate and illegally distribute premium content, according to Widevine. It enables operators to extend their content licensing for PC delivery immediately.

"As the convergence of content into and out of the living room evolves, operators must be mindful of the need to extend existing infrastructure investments with solutions that can affordably bridge delivery to other devices and players already in place," said ABI Research Industry Analyst Zippy Aima. "Widevine's multiplatform and multiformat content protection solution provides the protection across STBs, PVRs, PCs and portable media players. They have now expanded their content protection and watermarking to include media transport capabilities that extend traditional services into to the PC user experience."

Last week, Widevine announced expanded capabilities for operators to quickly secure content between multiple devices within an in-home network using the company’s Cypher 4.2 (story here).

The new release adds hardware acceleration within the Sigma Designs 8364 secure processor on the Cisco line of IP set-top boxes (STBs) and digital video recorders (DVRs) to support enhanced services, such as multi-room DVR. It also includes support for network address translation (NAT) for unlimited expansion of the consumer domain to accommodate STBs, DVRs, PCs, handsets and portable media players.

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