Conditional Access in North America
In Canadian and United States cable systems, the standard for conditional access is provided with CableCARDs whose specification was developed by the cable company consortium CableLabs.
Cable companies in the US are required by the Federal Communications Commission to support CableCARDs; standards now exist for two way communication (M-card) but satellite television has its own standards. Next generation approaches in the United States eschew such physical cards and employ schemes using downloadable software for conditional access such as DCAS.
The main appeal of such approaches is that the access control may be upgraded dynamically in response to security breaches without requiring expensive exchanges of physical conditional access modules. Another appeal is that it may be inexpensively incorporated into non-traditional media display devices such as Portable media players.
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