On 24th october, IRDETO announced that it acquired  BayTSP (who was founded by Marc ISHIKAWA).   BayTSP is one of the few companies that are scouting the Net, on behalf of the content owners, to identify illegal copies of content.   IRDETO was initially a Conditional Access solution providers.   For several years, IRDETO has been acquiring some companies to enlarge its offer while staying focused on distributing securely content.

Recently, IRDETO purchased Cloakware, a company specialized in Tamper Resistant Software.  This acquisition allowed IRDETO to promote a more robust software-based solution (card less).  Cloakware would take care of the protection of the software which is the usual weakness point of card less solutions.   More recently, IRDETO acquired the division of Rovi in charge of SPDC.  SPDC is the system that may implement applets to bring additional secuity in BD+.  Rovi acquired this division from Paul Kocher’s CRI (Cryptography Research Inc).

Now with BayTSP, IRDETO can offer, in addition to its protection; a service of investigation.   Nice move.   Is the offer complete?  I would tend to believe that there is a missing piece: forensic watermark.  Next acquisition?

Thanks to Gwen for the pointer.