Talk:Conditional access

Hardware pairing, smart cards, PCMCIA CI modules are not discussed. This article appears half baked and appears inadequate for any person trying to learn from Wikipedia. I wish people put in more effort.

It seems to me that conditional access is just newspeak for access control - is there any point having a second entry? or can we just switch conditional access to a redirect to access control ? e.g. on this web site of people who link non-free content http://www.scmmicro.de/dvb/index.html all uses of conditional access seem to be just a fancy new name for access control or encryption/decryption. Boud 11:42, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I concur. This should probably be redirected to access control. If necessary, access control could mention the term conditional access as an alternate/buzzword name. - Alynna 13:12, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Condtional Access is TV jargon, meaning slightly more than just access control. the Wikipedia has a good if extremely messy article on this, which I'm going to try to emulate (but not translate, both it and my German aren't good enough) here, and use this solely to refer to condional access in the DVB sense. --Kiand 17:26, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Access control article is ok for the general concepts, but the specifics for the Telecommunications and CE domain must be explained in an isolated context so that the reader is not swamped with out of context peripheral concepts (eg. access control to a building). For example, if someone were trying to understand DVB-CA or Cablecard security access schemes, the predication chain they could follow is Cablecard ISA system employing conditional access which ISA access control mechanism.  Conditional access software is an approach which is being considered by Consumer electronics and Media distribution companies worldwide for use not just in television but portable media applications.  It is closely related to Digital Rights Management which is a source of a great deal of user interest and confusion.  As such, "Conditional Access" is valuable term not because it is fashionable, but because it is a significant and distinct consumer electronics and telecommunications concept.  It deserves separate treatment in a separate article, but I do agree that the general concepts should be referred to the access control article. -Mak 18:28, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The arbitrary and original research in the list and other information will make merging this information difficult. I think redirecting to Access control is the best and make mention of the basic term of Conditional access along with citations that can be found in reliable sources.

I've tagged the article for:
 * This article contains embedded lists that may be poorly defined, unverified or indiscriminate.
 * This article possibly contains original research.
 * This article's use of red links may not follow Wikipedia's guidelines.

on top of the others that have been put onto the article:
 * The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (January 2015)
 * This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2008)

Pmedema (talk) 17:41, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Suggested merge
It seemed logical to me to merge the content from Conditional access system into the main Conditional access article, as the former is directly derived from the latter. I won't make any sudden changes though until enough time has passed to allow for others to comment here. Bumm13 (talk) 09:05, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Subscriber costs
The article doesn't mention fees the subscriber has to pay to even be able to get conditional access.

In Ohio, your 'basic cable' fees will increase substantially if you utilize the cablecard scheme to decode the channels they have moved to their digital tiers, such as C-SPAN 2. They do not provide a signal that can be decoded by a standard HDTV tuner.

If you have analog service at $10/month, Time Warner wants to 'rent' the cablecard at 2.50/month, and you would still have to provide some sort of box to plug the cablecard into - unless there is a TV model that is compatible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.101.136.61 (talk) 13:03, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I have heard that even if you buy your own cablecard, cable operators and other access providers can and do still charge for access through the cablecard. Nick Garnett 15:09, 18 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nickgarnett (talk • contribs)

Market barrier to entry
I would like to add a short section on the fact that conditional access technologies can act as a major bottleneck in competition between pay-TV broadcasters. According to Nolan, D. Bottlenecks in pay television: Impact on market development in Europe Telecommunications Policy, 1997, 21, 597-610:
 * Establishment of conditional access dominance flows from first-mover advantages, consumer resistance to 'box-towers' of decoders from different service providers/delivery system operators. and the manner in which conditional access is implemented in the decoder (embedded vs. attachable). (p. 601)

Any thoughts on this? Niclas 08:20, 10 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Niclas M. (talk • contribs)

Conflct of interest (Viaccess employee)
I recently made an edit that revoked a prior edit. This edit removed a number of entries on the Viaccess conditional access system. The editor's IP address (195.6.224.137) is from Viaccess themselves. More specifically, an IP address belonging to "VIAACCESS SA," a firm involved in the development of DRM. See Viaccess, or the site at viaacess.com. The user's contributions are certainly interesting. The IP's reverse DNS is actually chronos.viaccess.com, and given it's from an organization, I'm going to guess that it's an outbound NAT device, so these contributions may be from multiple employees.

My thought/question: does an employee of a DRM company making changes to pages about DRM constitute an expert contribution? Conflict of interest? I'm sure there's a policy on it somewhere. Only two such edits seem to be conflict-y, but they're definitely conflict-y. I've revoked the one on this page. Comments encouraged! Overand (talk) 16:25, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

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widevine compromised
L3 https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1080606827384131590?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.8.243.184 (talk) 05:09, 25 July 2019 (UTC)