DRE Announces Free Conditional Access Capability for FMeXtra

April 13, 2007, San Jose, CA. Digital Radio Express (DRE) announced today immediate availability of open standards conditional access technology for use in its FMeXtra digital FM SCA system at no extra cost. Conditional access is the capability to encrypt broadcast signals so that only selected receivers may decode the digital broadcast. The FMeXtra system is based on Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP). SRTP was developed by Cisco Systems™, Ericsson Research™ and other network security experts and is published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC3711.

The DRE conditional access solution includes AES stream encryption, SHA data authentication, timed keys, and encrypted key table management. The DRE software package includes tools for activating and deactivating individual or groups of receivers. All FMeXtra radios in production are conditional access-ready and a software update for previous FMeXtra encoder versions is available at no charge.

Derek Kumar, VP of Engineering for DRE, states “In designing FMeXtra, we chose to implement Internet, MPEG and 3GPP open standards wherever possible. FMeXtra already supports open standard audio codecs including AAC and aacPlus™. We also support Internet standard RTP transport which made our groundbreaking Orban™ Opticodec™ streaming audio link possible. Support for SRTP is a natural extension of this effort for applications which demand a secure environment.”

The combination of FMeXtra and conditional access permits subscription services and fine control of content distribution in single cost-effective solution. DRE’s open standards based approach enables a single conditional access solution to be used across a broad range of networks and devices including PDAs and mobile phones. Example applications include reading services for the blind, member-only listener channels, secure emergency and altering systems, and private radio networks.