Chapter 3

Access Control

Overview

Adding the EtherneTV system to a network provides many benefits in the form of increasing access to rich media. However, because of the sensitive nature of some video assets, many customers want to limit access to different users or groups of users. VBrick's EtherneTV Portal Server allows Administrators to setup the system in just this manner. The ETV Portal Server makes it easy to provide different Users or User Groups access to different resources. The ETV Portal Server Access Control system allows administrators to allow/deny access to the portal server for Windows-based PCs, Macintoshes, and Set-Top Boxes:

Viewing of certain Live Channels

Viewing of stored content from specific VoD folders

Publishing content to specific VoD folders

Recording content to a specific VoD folder

Allow the viewing of content from only specific VoD servers on the network

The ability to place bandwidth restrictions for viewing content

The ability to limit certain users to only access Multicast or RTSP (unicast) content

The ability to group content resources (Live Channels and/or VoD content) into Resource Groups, which allows the setup and modification of the Access Control functionality to take place much more easily.

The ETV Portal Server is permissive by default, meaning, authentication is not enabled and access to the entire functionality of the server is allowed. However, to follow good security practices, once the Access Control functionality is enabled on the Portal Server, all resources are by default not available to any users. Administrators need to provide access to resources to different users or user groups.

Topics in this chapter

Overview

STB Authentication

Users

User Groups

Resource Groups

Definitions

The ability to provide different users different access to resources on a network is typically referred to as access control, authentication and authorization, and/or access management. VBrick refers to this functionality as Access Control. In order to fully understand the range of

ETV Portal Server Administrator Guide

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VBrick Systems ETV v3.1 manual Access Control, Definitions