WO2012088633A1

WO2012088633A1 - Video receiving device and authentication control method thereof

Info

Publication number: WO2012088633A1
Application number: PCT/CN2010/002205
Authority: WO
Inventors: Guobin WU; Xilin YIN; Qi Zhang
Original assignee: Technicolor (China) Technology Co., Ltd.
Priority date: 2010-12-30
Filing date: 2010-12-30
Publication date: 2012-07-05

Abstract

An authentication control method for a first video receiving device is provided. The first video receiving device is adapted to receive and process video signals upon a first authentication performed at the first video receiving device or upon receipt of a second authentication from a second video receiving device. The method comprises: upon detection of unavailability of the second authentication from the second video receiving device, determining whether to perform the first authentication at the first video receiving device as a function of the distance between the first and the second video receiving devices. A video receiving device using the above method is also described.

Description

VIDEO RECEIVING DEVICE AND AUTHENTICATION CONTROL METHOD

THEREOF

TECHNICAL FIELD

The present invention generally relates to access control for video system, and in particular, to a video receiving device and an authentication control method thereof.

BACKGROUND

It should be noted that this section is intended to introduce various aspects of art to the reader, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.

A television Set-Top-Box (STB) is a commonly used home video receiving device for receiving video services from remote resources, such as a cable, satellite or internet service provider. In the following text, a STB for a cable television service will be described as an example of the home video receiving device. However, a person skilled in the art could appreciate that the home video receiving device can take any other forms.

Today, more and more households contain two or more STBs to receive cable television service. Hereinafter, a household that subscribes to a cable television service provider will be referred to as a subscriber household. Normally a subscriber household will be billed for each one of its STBs. But as one common service of many service providers, a primary STB in a subscriber household is billed at a full service rate while subsequent STBs will be billed at a lower rate. However, in the above case, if one of the subsequent STBs in a subscriber household is taken to a nonsubscriber household which is also in the service area of the service provider, an unauthorized television viewing can be performed in the nonsubscriber household, even at a lower service rate. Apparently, this case is unreasonable and always be seen by the service provider as a theft of service. In view of the above problem, a master-slave mechanism of multiple STBs in a subscriber household was proposed. WO06026477 entitled "CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT FOR CO-LOCATED NETWORK SYSTEMS" by Derren-Berger et al, filed on August 31 , 2004, describes a video distribution system with a master-slave mechanism (hereinafter referred to as prior art 1 ). According to the prior art 1 , a STB in a subscriber household can be configured in a main state or a secondary state. The STB in the main state (master) will determine the co-location state of a STB in the secondary state (slave) and transmit authorization information to the slave STB in response to the determination. The slave STB is enabled to process program signals and provide output signals in response to the authorization information. If a salve STB is not co-located with the master, it will be put in a third state where the program signal processing is disabled. This solution can prevent a slave STB from being taken to a nonsubscriber household to perform an authorized television viewing.

However, there is a new challenge to the above solution. In the newest European industry standard, the power of a STB in a standby mode should be less than 1W, in which case the CPU of the STB actually cannot work anymore. Therefore, if the master STB is in standby mode or power off (that is, inactive), a television viewing cannot be performed at the other slave STBs because their pairing links with the master STB are disconnected and no authentication can be received. In this case, a viewer who wants to view a TV program with a slave STB may have to turn on the master STB again.

US2008077967A1 entitled "VIDEO RECEIVING DEVICE, VIDEO DATA RECEIVING SYSTEM AND AUTHENTICATION CONTROL METHOD THEREOF" by Nagoshi et al, filed on September 26, 2007, provides a solution to permit a television viewing at a slave STB when the master is power off or in a status of low- power standby by transferring an authentication from the master STB to the slave STB (hereinafter referred to as prior art 2). However, since the solution of the prior art 2 requests for a transferring of the authentication in advance (that is, when both the master and slave STBs are active), a relatively complex operation will be needed for a user if at least one of the master and slave STBs is power off. For example, if a master STB in a subscriber household is power off before the authentication is transferred to a slave STB while the user wants to have a television viewing with the slave STB, the user may have to move back and forth between the master and slave STBs to turn on/off them. This will be very inconvenient for the user, especially when the subscriber household has a large space and co-located STBs have different locations.

SUMMARY

According one aspect of the invention, an authentication control method for a first video receiving device is provided. The first video receiving device is adapted to receive and process video signals upon a first authentication performed at the first video receiving device or upon receipt of a second authentication from a second video receiving device. The method comprises: upon detection of unavailability of the second authentication from the second video receiving device, determining whether to perform the first authentication at the first video receiving device as a function of the distance between the first and the second video receiving devices.

According another aspect of the invention, a video receiving device is provided. The video receiving device comprises: an input for receiving a video signal from a video source; a processing unit for processing the video signal received by the input to provide a display signal; an output for providing the display signal generated by the processing unit to a display device; a pairing unit for identifying a first or second operating state of the video receiving device and for establishing a pairing link with a second video receiving device with a communication unit; an authentication unit for, in the first operating state, performing a first authentication to receive the video signal by the input from the video source and process the received video signal by the processing unit, and for, in a second operating state, receiving a second authentication to receive and process video signal from the second video receiving device; a sensing unit for detecting the distance between the video receiving device and the second video receiving device; and a control unit, under the control of which, upon detection of an unavailability of the second authentication from the second video receiving device, determining whether to perform the first authentication by the authentication unit as a function of the distance between the video receiving device and the second video receiving device detected by the sensing unit.

It is to be understood that more aspects and advantages of the invention will be found in the following detailed description of the present invention.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The accompanying drawings, which are included to provide a further understanding of the illustrate embodiments of the invention together with the description which serves to explain the principle of the invention. Therefore, the invention is not limited to the embodiments. In the drawings:

Figure 1 is an exemplary diagram showing a master-slave mechanism of STBs in a subscriber household according to an embodiment of the present invention;

Figure 2 is a flow chart showing the work flow of a method for authentication control for a STB according to an embodiment of the present invention; and

Figure 3 is an exemplary block diagram showing the structure a STB according to an embodiment of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

An embodiment of the present invention will now be described in detail in conjunction with the drawings. In the following description, some detailed descriptions of known functions and configurations may be omitted for clarity and conciseness.

Figure 1 is an exemplary diagram showing a master-slave mechanism of STBs in a subscriber household. As shown in Figure 1 , one master STB and three slave STBs 01 , 02 and 03, that is, four STBs in total, are co-located in a subscriber household. Please note that the number of STBs in Figure 1 is only for illustrative purpose. It is obvious that a subscriber household can contain more or less STBs. The STBs can communicate between each other via a home LAN (Local Area Network), which can be wire or wireless based.

It can be appreciated by a person skilled in the art that a STB can have an authentication function for receiving a permission to receive and process a program data from a cable television service provider and for permitting another STB connected via the home LAN to receive the program data. The authentication function can be preset by the service provider in the form of, for example, a smartcard that is inserted into the STB. For a STB operating as master, the authentication function is for receiving the permission to receive and process the program data and also for permitting its slave STBs to access the program data. For a STB operating as slave, the authentication function is for receiving the permission from its master by establishing a link to its master via the home LAN. Normally we call this link a pairing link between a master and a slave. Without authentication obtained via such a pairing link, a salve cannot access the program data. The procedure of the authentication of a STB and the pairing link established between a master and a slave are conventional. Therefore, detailed description is omitted.

As shown in Figure 1 , an embodiment of the present invention introduces a sensor system into the master-slave mechanism of STBs in a subscriber household, for detecting a position relationship between a slave and a master, based on which an authentication control is carried out. Next, a detailed description will be given.

Figure 2 is a flow chart showing the work flow of a method for authentication control of a STB (for example, the slave STB 01 in Figure 1 ) according to an embodiment of the present invention.

At step 201 , a determination will be made to detect whether the STB is operating as slave in a subscriber household. It can be appreciated that an operating state of a STB (master/slave) can be set in advance by a service provider or a user. For example, a user can set a STB in his/her living room as master and STBs in other rooms as slaves during the configuration of the STBs. A master/slave state can be fixed, or a master can transfer its authentication privilege to a slave, for example, by the process as described by the prior art 2. In the latter case, a slave can become the master temporarily. It is obvious that a master/slave state of a STB can be easily detected, for example, upon booting the STB.

If the determination result of step 201 is "No", which means the STB is operating as master, the process goes to step 202 where an authentication is performed, for example, by reading information from a smartcard of the STB provided by the service provider. As described above, an authentication for a master permits the STB for receiving and processing a program data from a cable television service provider and for permitting another STB connected via the home LAN to receive the program data. With regarding the authentication, a pairing link will be established between the master and a slave (if any) to allow the slave STB to access the program data. In this respect, normally a pairing request will be sent from a slave and the master will respond with information periodically to establish and maintain the pairing link, which information generally includes master tag and message showing that master STB is still active. Since a pairing process is conventional in the art, no further description will be given in this respect.

If the determination result of step 201 is "Yes", which means the STB should operate as slave, the process goes to step 203 where a further determination is made to detect whether a master is active in the subscriber household. In this step, a conventional handshake message exchange process can be applied. In particular, the salve can broadcast a message over the communication bus of the home LAN, requesting for a master to response. Upon receipt of this message, the master will acknowledge with a response message, indicating it is active. If no response message received from the master within a predetermined period, the slave will determine that the master is not active.

If the determination result of step 203 is "Yes", which means there is a master STB in the subscriber household which is active (power on), the process goes to an establishment of a pairing link, as described in step 204. Next, at step 205, the slave STB will receive authentication from the master via the established pairing link.

If the determination result of step 203 is "No", which means the master STB in the subscriber household is not active (that is, being power off or in a low-power standby mode), the process goes to step 206 where a distance between the slave and the master is detected.

At the following step 207, a determination is made to detect whether a difference between the distance detected in step 206 and a predetermined value exceeds a threshold. It can be appreciated that the step 207 is to judge whether the slave STB is moved out of a subscriber household, for example, to a neighboring nonsubscriber household. In this respect, said predetermined value can be set in advance by the service provider. It can also be dynamically set to a distance between the slave and the master that is previously detected during the last master-slave operation. The threshold value can be set in view of the specific condition of the subscriber household, for example, the area of the house. It can be appreciated that the threshold value can be set to be zero, which means the distance between the slave and the master should be equal to the predetermined value.

If the determination result of step 207 is "No", the process goes to step 208 where an authentication is performed locally at the slave STB, for example, by reading information from smartcard of the STB.

If the determination result of step 207 is "Yes", which means there is a possibility that the slave STB is moved out of the subscriber household, then the slave STB is requested to re-establish a pairing link with its master, which process is described in step 204. This step normally will request the master STB to be power on.

As shown in Figure 3, a STB 300 comprises an input 301 for receiving a video signal from a video source, for example, a television program service provider (not shown). The STB 300 also comprises a processing unit 302 for processing the video signal received by the input 301 to provide a display signal. The STB 300 further comprises an output 303 for providing the display signal generated by the processing unit 302 to a display device, (for example, a TV set, not shown) that can display the display signal to a user, for example, a television program viewer. It can be appreciated by a person skilled in the art that the above described input 301 , processing unit 302 and output 303 are essential to the STB 300 and also conventional in the art.

The STB 300 also comprises a master/slave pairing unit 304 for identifying a master or slave mode of the STB 300 and for establishing, by communication via the below described communication unit 306, a pairing link with another STB which operates as slave or master of the STB 300. The STB 300 comprises an authentication unit 305 for, in a master mode, receiving a permission to receive the video signal by the input 301 from the video source and process the received video signal by the processing unit 302, and permitting another STB to receive the program data, and for, in a slave mode, receiving the permission to receive and process video signal from another STB by establishing a pairing link to the another STB via the below described communication unit 306.

As shown in Figure 3, The STB 300 comprises a communication unit 306 for connecting to the home LAN to establish communications with the other STBs in the subscriber household. With the communication unit 306, the STB 300 can establish a pairing link with another STB in the subscriber household.

The STB 300 also comprises a sensing unit 307 for detecting the distance between the STB 300 and another STB that has a pairing link with the STB 300. It could be appreciated that any appropriate sensing technologies can be applied in the sensing unit 307, which might request for a counterpart sensing unit provided in the another STB in the subscriber household. If the STB 300 is possible to be a master, the sensing unit 307 should be capable of operating properly even when the STB 300 is power off. Therefore, except for the case that the STB is always a slave in the above-described fixed master-slave mechanism, an independent power supply for the sensing unit 306 is necessary.

The STB 300 comprises a control unit 308 for controlling the operation of the STB 300 in accordance with the above-described method of the embodiment of the invention. The following is a detailed description to the operation of the STB 300 under the control of the control unit 308.

Firstly, the master/slave pairing unit 304 will determine whether the STB 300 is operating as master or slave in a subscriber household. If the STB 300 is operating as master, the authentication unit 305 will perform authentication, for example, by reading information from a smartcard inserted into the STB 300 provided by the service provider. In this case, the authentication will permits the input 301 to receive a program data from a cable television service provider and the processing unit 302 to process the video signal received by the input 301 to provide a display signal via the output 303. In addition, the authentication can also permit another STB connected via the home LAN to access the program data upon an establishment of a paring link between the STB 300 and a slave STB.

If the STB 300 should operate as slave, the master/slave pairing unit 304 will further determine whether a master STB is active in the subscriber household. If there is an active master STB in the subscriber household, the master/slave pairing unit 304 will request for establishing a pairing link with the master STB, by which the authentication unit 305 will get an authentication from the master STB to permit the input 301 to receive a program data from a cable television service provider and the processing unit 302 to process the video signal received by the input 301 to provide a display signal. If the master STB is not active, the control unit 308 will instruct the sensing unit 307 to detect a distance between the STB 300 and its master STB.

Next, the control unit 308 will determine whether a difference between the detected distance and a predetermined value exceeds a threshold. If the result of the determination is "No", the authentication unit 305 will perform an authentication, for example, by reading information from smartcard of the STB 300. If the result of the determination is "Yes", then the control unit 308 will instruct the master/slave pairing unit 304 to try to establish a pairing link with the master STB, through which an authentication from the master STB can be requested.

According to the embodiment of the present invention, an improved master-slave mechanism of co-located STBs associated with a common account is provided, which is more convenient for the user and at the same time can effectively prevent a service theft.

The invention is described with reference to a cable TV STB. However, it could be appreciated by a person skilled in the art that, for the other video receiving device operating under a master-slave mechanism, the invention also applies.

It will be understood that the present invention has been described purely by way of example, and modifications of detail can be made without departing from the scope of the invention. Each feature disclosed in the description and (where appropriate) the claims and drawings may be provided independently or in any appropriate combination. Features may, where appropriate be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination of the two.

Claims

1. An authentication control method for a first video receiving device adapted to receive and process video signals upon a first authentication performed at the first video receiving device or upon receipt of a second authentication from a second video receiving device, characterized by further comprising

upon detection of unavailability of the second authentication from the second video receiving device, determining whether to perform the first authentication at the first video receiving device as a function of the distance between the first and the second video receiving devices.

2. The authentication control method according to the claim 1 , further comprising: calculating a difference between said distance and a first predetermined value; performing the first authentication at the first video receiving device when said difference is smaller than or equal to a second predetermined value.

3. The authentication control method according to the claim 1 , further comprising: calculating a difference between said distance and a first predetermined value; requesting for the second authentication from the second video receiving device when said difference is greater than a second predetermined value.

4. The method according to the claim 2 or 3, further comprising:

setting the second predetermined value to zero.

5. The method according to any one of the previous claims, further comprising, establishing a pairing link with the second video receiving device to request for the second authentication from the second video receiving device.

6. A video receiving device (300), comprising:

an input (301) for receiving a video signal from a video source; a processing unit (302) for processing the video signal received by the input (301) to provide a display signal;

an output (303) for providing the display signal generated by the processing unit (302) to a display device;

a pairing unit (304) for identifying a first or second operating state of the video receiving device and for establishing a pairing link with a second video receiving device with a communication unit (306);

an authentication unit (305) for, in the first operating state, performing a first authentication to receive the video signal by the input (301 ) from the video source and process the received video signal by the processing unit (302), and for, in a second operating state, receiving a second authentication to receive and process video signal from the second video receiving device;

a sensing unit (307) for detecting the distance between the video receiving device and the second video receiving device; and

a control unit (308), under the control of which

upon detection of an unavailability of the second authentication from the second video receiving device, determining whether to perform the first authentication by the authentication unit (305) as a function of the distance between the video receiving device and the second video receiving device detected by the sensing unit (307).

7. The video receiving device (300) according to the claim 6, wherein the authentication unit (305) performs the first authentication when a difference between said distance and a first predetermined value is smaller than or equal to a second predetermined value.

8. The video receiving device (300) according to the claim 6, wherein the pairing unit (304) establishes a paring link with the second video receiving device and the authentication unit (305) requests for the second authentication from the second video receiving device via the pairing link when a difference between said distance and a first predetermined value is greater than a second predetermined value.

9. The video receiving device (300) according to any one the claims 6-8, wherein the video receiving device (300) is a STB for cable television.

10. The video receiving device (300) according to any one the claims 6-9, wherein the sensing unit (307) is independently powered.