Taiwan's state-owned Chunghwa Telecom has purchased an additional 300,000 Virtual SmartCard clients from Widevine Technologies to secure premium linear broadcast and video-on-demand delivery across a wide range of consumer electronics devices. This is in addition to the 500,000 clients Chunghwa purchased in 2005 for planned subscriber growth.

Chunghwa's interactive TV service, Multimedia on Demand (MOD), is one of the largest IPTV deployments in the world. Customers of the MOD service can take advantage of a wide range of video-on-demand, near VOD (NVOD), karaoke-on-demand and linear broadcast channels. Widevine Cypher is used exclusively to protect the entire Chunghwa multimedia footprint across Taiwan.

"The expansion of Chunghwa's core VOD and linear broadcast offerings is an important step forward in realizing our vision of offering MOD services to our entire subscriber base of four million customers," said Yi-Fong Chang, Managing Director of Chunghwa's Multimedia Department. "Our ability to acquire and license premium content for our fixed-line business has been greatly enhanced by Widevine's comprehensive content protection solutions. We chose Widevine over other solutions because of its solid reputation with Hollywood Studios and it is proven in IPTV deployments worldwide."

"Widevine is up to the challenge of keeping Chunghwa's content licenses intact," says Brian Baker, Widevine's President and CEO. "We are pleased to continue an aggressive expansion across the country and evaluate other opportunities to assist Chunghwa with the major motion picture studios and broadcasters."

According to IP media research analyst Colin Dixon of The Diffusion Group, "Now that Chunghwa has proven it can scale its IPTV service, it is beginning to look at bringing those services to multiple consumer devices. Operators need a proven, single security solution such as Widevine's that not only scales but also reaches across set top boxes, PCs and mobile phones."