Managing PINs and parental control

Overview

OpenTV Video Platform enables the use of PINs to restrict access to content or functionality. These are typically:

• A purchase PIN that must be entered to make a purchase
• A parental PIN that must be entered to access age-restricted content

It is the responsibility of the client application to prompt the user for a PIN at the appropriate time and to enforce any restrictions. For more information, see PIN and parental control management in the client integration guide.

This section explains how to configure the platform to enable this functionality. This consists of:

• Ensuring that the ingested content includes:
  • The necessary rating information
  • For live channels (only required for certain rating bodies – optional and deployment-dependent):
    • A flag to indicate whether the channel is free-to-air or not
    • A flag to indicate whether content protection is mandatory for the channel. (If the flag is true, client apps are required to enforce parental control for playback for the channel (typically for non-free-to-air channels)).

  See Metadata ingest format.

• Specifying rating thresholds for accounts (only required for certain rating bodies).
  See Setting parental ratings thresholds.

Note that PIN restrictions (PIN format (length and permitted characters), number of permitted incorrect PIN entry attempts, and lockout time if the number of entry attempts is exceeded) are configured by NAGRA at deployment time.

This section also explains how to:

• Add or update a PIN Type
• Get PIN Types
• Delete PIN Types
• Add or change the PIN on an account – OTT
• Add or change the PIN for a device – DTH
• Reset the PIN for a device – DTH
• Getting the status of all PINs for a customer account

See also

PIN and parental control management (Client integration guide)