AMSTERDAM (HOLLAND): News Corp subsidiary NDS claims that it has become the world's first company to supply smartcards to 30 million active digital pay-TV subscribers.

The declaration comes after the highest-ever revenues in any quarter for NDS announced in August 2002 , which were 65.0 million and a 20 per cent increase over the last quarter of the previous financial year. For the full year, revenues increased 12 per cent from 215.6 million to 240.8 million, with conditional access revenues at 41.7 million for the quarter, a company release states.

2002 continued to be a record year for NDS and growth has been strong in US, UK, Israel and Asia-Pacific. In addition, NDS recently reached an agreement with Scientific-Atlanta to implement its conditional access technology into Explorer digital interactive set-tops that will be provided to Cablevision.

In June this year, Motorola agreed to integrate NDS interactive and conditional access solutions with their digital set-top boxes. In the UK and Israel NDS customers have continued to experience growth in subscriber numbers as they offer advanced interactive television on low cost set-top boxes. Asia-Pacific has been boosted by the launch of SkyLife in Korea and initial roll-out of set-top boxes is now occurring in China. Sichuan Provincial Network launched its digital interactive TV service in May 2002, using NDS's end-to-end solutions, including the Open VideoGuard conditional access system.