BigPatents India

The need for enabling content providers to authenticate those given access to certain content is addressed by embodiments of the present invention. When a content delivery server (110) receives a request from user equipment (UE) (101) to subscribe to a content delivery session, the content delivery server determines whether content provider authentication is required. If it is, the content delivery server requests authentication by a content provider (120) for the UE for the session. After obtaining needed authentication parameters, the content provider indicates to the content delivery server an authentication result. The content delivery server then either denies the UE subscription request or proceeds with UE subscription based on the authentication result. (FIG. 1)