A Rapid TV News ‘Round Table' talked about the Middle East's DVB pay-TV players suffering piracy of 60%. The multiples of millions of Dollars being lost per month also contribute to preventing opertors from selling content effectively.

James Field, Director of Technology/New Initiatives, NDS Ltd, agreed. "The ability [for operators] to differentiate their products and services in an increasingly complicated media landscape that our customers are dealing with, and they need to be able to package and sell their products in as many different ways as possible. Let's not forget, Pay Television is no get-rich-quick scheme. It's a long-term return on investment so you need to make sure there's a security guarantee or solution that can take you forward in profitability."

Andy Mathieson, a director at software CA suppliers Latens, said that in some markets, however, CA adopted a somewhat different role. I think in some markets it's definitely seen as the necessary evil: the burglar alarm that your insurance company told you had to buy, and in the IPTV markets in particular in some sectors, that's how it's perceived. But in other sectors, [especially] cable and satellite pay-TV operators recognise that it's a business enabler. It's the operators that we are really protecting the revenues of, and you only have to look at the piracy figures in all sorts of parts of the world. I recently saw suggestions that in the Middle East, in the DVB world, there was over 60% piracy.

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Rapid TV News reports that Beirut-based Future TV is back on the air, as of May 13th, following its closure last week when equipment was destroyed in a raid that also set fire to the station. At the time, according to station boss Nadim al-Munla, it was expected that the station could be off air for “weeks” .

Future TV, a popular pan-Arab regional entertainment channel that’s been on air since 1993.  The station is owned by the Hariri family. Mr al-Munla told journalists on the LBC Satellite TV station that a group of gunmen belonging to Hezbollah besieged the building and threatened that if the transmission did not stop, the entire facility would be destroyed.

According to BBC Monitoring, Mr al-Munla said “We received [this information] through an officer belonging to a Lebanese Army. The management of Future TV decided to stop transmission in order to protect the employees inside, as well as the facility itself. We were forced to stop transmission and placed the facility in the hands of the Lebanese Army.”

Future TV was then handed over to the Lebanese Army, but moments later, said al-Munla, “armed elements and television experts entered the building and tore off all the wiring in the building in order to prevent transmission, which would not resume today or tomorrow and probably for weeks. It seems that their intelligence was very efficient. One gunman inside the Future Television building contacted the technical manager, who was taking shelter in a west Beirut building, and asked him to tell the gunmen where the cameras where placed and where the computers that save all the video of what goes on inside the centre were to be found in order to confiscate all the videotapes and prevent us from transmitting to the Lebanese and Arab people what exactly these gangs did and what happened inside the building.”

In any case, on Tuesday May 13, Future TV and its sister News channel, were unexpectedly back up and running from studios in West Beirut in the Sin el-Fil district.