NAGRA is the leader in the global Conditional Access market – ahead of Cisco, says IHS Markit.

NAGRA has secured 30 percent share of Conditional Access spend, grabbing significant share of Cisco’s foregone content security revenue in 2016.

Conditional Access (CA) spend fell from $1.97 billion to $1.92 billion in 2016. Cisco’s CA revenue fell by 17 percent, according to the IHS Markit Content Security: Vendor Analysis 2017 report.

In conjunction with Conax, another Kudelski Group security provider, the combined group entity controls 35 percent of the global CA market and leads the industry by a considerable margin.

“The content security industry is rife with competitive repositioning and strategic maneuvering,” said Merrick Kingston, principal analyst at IHS Markit. “Ultimately, however, NAGRA’s advance is attributable to a single empirical antecedent: the firm has shown unparalleled commitment to broadening the scope and capability of its security portfolio.”

Broadcast CA and proprietary DRM are part-and-parcel of any minimum viable security solution, but encryption alone is no longer sufficient to impede illicit, systemic re-streaming. Secure media players, forensic watermarking, piracy monitoring, and infrastructure security form the crux of an expanded, holistic approach to revenue security.

Media companies are not prepared to predicate the integrity of their business model on passive encryption alone.

At present, NAGRA alone offers an end-to-end suite comprising transmission, storage, data center, and on-device security, as well as proprietary content tracking and proactive, piracy monitoring and takedown services.

“Moving into the network infrastructure space is a non-starter; the cost of entry, coupled with the ARRIS-Cisco-Huawei oligopoly, precludes this form of diversification. Firms with a provenance in video hardware, software, and apps have other diversification options at their disposal,” Kingston said.