MULTI-VENDOR CONDITIONAL ACCESS SYSTEM

摘要

The invention provides a smartcard, a head-end system and a conditional access system enabling incompatible receivers to be used in a vendor specific conditional access system. Hereto the smartcard stores an operation mode identifier, which is read upon insertion of the smartcard into the receiver and activation of the smartcard. The operation mode identifier is used to select a protocol for communication with the receiver. If the protocol is incompatible with the receiver, the operation mode identifier is changed and another protocol is selected upon reinsertion of the smartcard in the receiver. The head-end system uses data packet encapsulation to enable the receiver to forward EMMs and ECMs to the smartcard.