Conditional access in the USA

In the United States cable systems, the standard for conditional access is provided with Cablecards whose specification was developed by the cable company consortium Cablelabs. Cable companies in the US are required by the Federal Communications Commission to support CableCards, but standards exist only for one way communication and do not apply to satellite television. Next generation approaches in the United States eschew such physical cards and employ schemes using downloadable software for conditional access such as DCAS. The main appeal of such approaches is that the access control may be upgraded dynamically in response to security breaches without requiring expensive exchanges of physical conditional access modules. Another appeal is that it may be inexpensively incorporated into non-traditional media display devices such as Portable media players.