Content and Service Protection for the Ubiquitous TV Based on Network Convergence

Today, the ubiquitous multimedia services are becoming more and more popular. However, the secure solutions that confirm the content and service security in these services are still open issues because of various network convergences and device interconnections. This paper investigates an ubiquitous multimedia service architecture and proposes a secure solution for it. In this service architecture, the multimedia content is encoded with scalable video coding and broadcasted via digital video broadcasting for handheld terminals (DVB-H) to mobile terminals, the access right is transmitted by global system for mobile (GSM/GPRS) channel, and the media content and access right can also be transferred from mobile terminals to home TV through WiFi based Wireless Local Area Network. The proposed secure solution supports three kinds of business models by using various content encryption modes and secure transmission protocols. The solution’s security is evaluated and discussed. Since few work has been done to solve this problem, the work proposed in this paper is expected to attract more researchers. Additionally, the solution is also potential for other ubiquitous services.