Satellite video security systems

During the last few years, satellites have been increasingly used to carry commercial free television programs, paid for by the viewers, as well as business and medical conferences. As a result, there is a large and growing need for video security systems to prevent both freeloading and eavesdropping. An ideal satellite security system would accept standard video and audio and convert them into totally random noise with no discernable information content. At the receive end, this noise would be converted back to video and audio identical to what went in. An investigation is conducted regarding the possibility to reproduce the features of the ideal system by means of a practically feasible system. It is pointed out that an extremely high degree of security can be achieved by digitizing signals, then applying an encryption algorithm. If done properly, the scrambled signal is almost random and the system is almost impossible to break.