Irdeto, a provider of content and business model protection solutions and services, has announced an expanded relationship with Al Jazeera Sport, part of the Al Jazeera Network and a provider of sports TV services in the Middle East and North Africa.

Irdeto will now protect Al Jazeera Sport’s premium content across its entire digital TV network and as part of the agreement, will source more than 500,000 Irdeto Smart Cards.

The expanded agreement between Al Jazeera Sport and Irdeto aligns with a drive in the Gulf to protect content and curb sales of illegal TV set-top boxes that decrypt pay-TV channels.

Irdeto informed its solution provides Al Jazeera Sport with a scalable Conditional Access System (CAS) featuring protection against the theft of content over their networks — including pay-per-view (PPV) and video-on-demand (VOD).

Harmonic has announced that Altibox (formerly Lyse Tele), a telecommunications service provider based in Norway, has deployed Harmonic’s StreamLiner video servers, Armada ‘intelligent asset management’, and ProStream 8000 digital mosaic solution.

The company informed the deployment will enable advanced IPTV video-on-demand (VOD) services and multi-channel mosaic viewing for Altibox subscribers across Norway and Denmark. Altibox is initially introducing this IPTV offering for Norwegian Elite Series football programming with plans to expand to additional sporting events in the future.

With this deployment, subscribers can watch a live football match and switch to on-demand viewing of important events in other matches using Altibox’s intuitive Electronic Program Guide (EPG).

In addition, the ProStream 8000 digital video mosaic solution generates the multi-channel mosaics that allow the subscriber to watch up to eight simultaneous football matches on a mosaic grid or in full-screen mode, and interactively link to the VOD content to follow highlights from all matches.

Modern Times Group (MTG), an international entertainment broadcasting group, has signed an agreement to acquire the live broadcasting rights to the National Hockey League (NHL) in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.

MTG’s coverage of the NHL will start in October 2009 with the beginning of the 2009-2010 season. The NHL’s rights are syndicated by sports media company, ESPN, in the Nordic region and the rest of Europe.

NHL games will be broadcast on Sweden’s ice hockey channel, Viasat Hockey, a new Swedish TV channel, launching this September; on Viasat Sport in Norway; and on Viasat channels in Finland and Denmark.

The agreement with ESPN and the NHL includes five exclusive NHL matches every week during the regular season between October and April, news and highlights from all NHL matches, and co-exclusive rights with ESPN America to all of the Stanley Cup Playoff games between April and June.

In addition to Viasat Hockey, NHL games will also appear on other Viasat channels in Sweden. The agreement also provides live online streaming rights to all NHL matches for Viasat OnDemand in conjunction with ESPN360, ESPN’s broadband service.

Viasat has already secured a range of exclusive ice hockey broadcasting rights including the annual IIHF World Championship, the KHL, Sweden’s HockeyAllsvenskan league and the Norwegian Get league.

Artificial Life has announced an exclusive global agreement with BMW to produce a BMW Sauber F1 Team racing car title for the iPhone and iPod touch.

This is the second collaboration between BMW and Artificial Life and follows the first iPhone title, ‘BMW Z4 – An Expression of Joy’.

The upcoming title will feature the new BMW Sauber F1.09 race car in 3D graphics and animations.

In the game, players take on the role of a BMW Sauber F1 Team driver to form a team with avatars of the famous professional drivers Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld racing against other virtual teams.

Races will take place on a variety of locations modeled after real race tracks around the world.

The game is tentatively scheduled for release in July 2009 pending approval.

Utah’s sports and entertainment venue, Rio Tinto Stadium, has partnered with Veritix, a player in end-to-end electronic ticketing and relationship marketing applications, to provide its Flash Seats digital ticketing technology for several Stadium events.

Flash Seats allows Rio Tinto Stadium to present a paperless method of ticket delivery to the venue’s customers and fans.

The Rio Tinto Flash Seats website for purchasing Eagles tickets is now live at riotintostadium.flashseats.com, while the opportunity for customers to digitally manage tickets for other Rio Tinto Stadium events will be added in the near future, the company informed.

Real Salt Lake and its venue are the first among Major League Soccer entities to adopt this technology, joining the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and Houston Rockets, offering for the first time an end-to-end paperless ticketing method to customers in both the primary and secondary marketplaces, the company added.