Smartcard and interactive TV software supplier NDS has reported a 100% increase in net profit over the last year, on a turnover of half a billion dollars.
NDS is a majority-owned subsidiary of News Corporation and is a leading supplier of content encryption and interactive television systems, notably to pay television services such as BSkyB, DIRECTV, Sky Italia and Foxtel.
Reporting results for the year to the end of June, NDS announced that net income is up 100% to just under $74 million, while annual revenue is up 56% to $556 million.
There are now 56.7 million active digital TV smart cards in use, up 29% from 44 million at the end of the previous year.
The company reports that NDS middleware, now all branded MediaHighway since the acquisition of the company of that name, has been installed on 20 million set-top boxes, an increase of 2 million since the previous year.
NDS has 2,500 employees, including contractors, an increase of 500 over the year.
Although perhaps best known as a supplier of encryption systems for pay-television satellite services and set-top box software, NDS has been branching into broadband, providing a content protections system called Synamedia for emerging IPTV, or internet protocol television, deployments.
Softbank will be deploying the NDS solution in the second phase of a commercial roll out to BBTV customers with the launch of a secure pay-TV service in Japan.
SuperSun, the pay-TV service of Galaxy Satellite Broadcasting in Hong Kong, will use the system for the delivery of premium content on its broadband platform.
Viasat Broadcasting will use NDS to provide content security for the delivery of pay-TV channels to over 300,000 households in 50 Swedish cities connected to the Bredbandsbolaget fibre network.
Auna will use Synamedia to make its existing pay-TV and video-on-demand services available to broadband customers across major cities in Spain.
Dr Abe Peled, president and chief executive of NDS said: “This has been a very challenging year for NDS, one in which we had to rapidly expand our resources to meet the expansion of new customer projects, as well as make progress on the integration of our MediaHighway acquisition.”