ByDesign delivers India’s first CAS for STBs


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Rebecca Hawkes

| 04 March 2016




Bangalore-based ByDesign has successfully completed the development of a conditional access system (CAS) for digital set-top boxes (STBs) in what is being hailed as an Indian manufacturing first.



The CAS has been developed following funding by India’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) in a project designed to promote electronics design and manufacture domestically, said the Communications and Information Technology Ministry.

To help complete the mandatory digitisation of India’s vast cable TV network, some 100 million STBs are projected to be required. Prior to this development, cable and satellite TV operators have had to rely on international manufacturers to seed CAS-ready STBs.

ByDesign India was selected to develop and implement the Indian Conditional Access System (iCASTM) in association with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in November 2014.

C-DAC has been responsible for the design review, code review, monitoring, testing and project validation. The iCASTM already supports seven Indian Languages and will support 15 more languages in the near future. It has been tested at the Cryptography Verification Labs, accredited by NIST in the US, and has also been field tested under Indian conditions.

ByDesign is now required to partner at least five cable or satellite operators and install at least 250,000 STBs with iCASTM.

More than 25,000 STBs with iCASTM have so far been deployed in 2016, and public broadcaster Doordarshan has reportedly adopted a version of ByDesign’s prototype to raise the number of channels on its direct-to-home (DTH) service Freedish to 112 from 64.