Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Converged digital TV services: the role of middleware and future directions of interactive television

The subject of the future of the interactive Television medium has become a topic of great interest to the academic and industrial communities particularly since in the recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation of convergence of digital TV systems and services. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of what we know as digital TV converged services, to present and categorise the digital Television middleware technologies that contributed to it, and to present possible future trends and directions. A new Television era of converged wireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content, multimodal interaction, intelligent personalisation, smart space awareness, and 3D content sensations is foreseen, creating ambient and immersive experiences

Power, Policy, and Digital Switchover: An Analysis of Communication Policy Making and its Challenges for Regulating Ghana’s Digital Television Sector

This thesis examines communication policy making in Ghana during the country’s digital switchover process launched in 2010. The thesis argues that Ghana’s digital switchover policy making process was an opportunity to refashion policy and regulatory structures towards the public interest that went beyond the modernisation of broadcasting transmission infrastructure and the innovations digital switchover brought. The thesis investigates whether, and the extent to which, structural and institutional characteristics in the communication policy arena facilitated or hindered broadcasting policy making, and explains the persistence of the analogue era broadcasting regulatory regime in the digital multichannel television market. Ghana’s return to Constitutional rule since 1992 led to the liberalisation of the broadcasting sector, permitting private ownership of broadcast media for the first time in the country’s history, as well as the reconfiguration of the communication policy making arena (and the wider policy environment), with more actors engaged in policy making. Yet, the manner in which this was achieved sustained the capability of state policy actors in the communication sector to influence the shape, pace and direction of policy due to the concentration of power within the Executive that granted the government excessive power. The thesis draws on political science and sociological concepts and approaches to analyse original qualitative data based on extensive documentary analysis and elite interviews with policy actors, during Ghana’s digital switchover policy making process from 2010. The study finds that political events during Ghana’s transition to Constitutional rule in the early 1990s, after ten years of military autocratic rule was the critical juncture that laid the foundation for a path-dependent communication policy making trajectory. Overtime this has produced a fractured and uncoordinated broadcasting policy making context whereby policy makers act without much consideration for the wider interest of the sector, whilst non-state policy actors remain ineffective to sustain advocacy that would serve the public interest. This played out during Ghana’s digital switchover process as the dominance of state-controlled policy actors ensured the framing of domestic digital switchover policy objectives along narrow externally set priorities at the expense of longstanding and pertinent broadcasting policy and regulatory concerns that could have been part of the country’s digital switchover policy making agenda. The study maintains that as the full implications of the digital switchover process on Ghana’s broadcasting sector becomes apparent, the continued lack of an adequate policy and regulatory framework for the new digital television broadcasting market, and, indeed the larger broadcasting sector, does not serve the public interest and as such, it impoverishes the broadcasting service available to citizens