Canadian video App specialist You.i TV, says it has adapted Turner’s Cartoon Network app for Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Previously it was on iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. You.i TV prides itself on being able to write code once and put apps on any platform. It is showing it off at CES.
Comcast has closed a new licensing deal with 21st Century Fox to keep Fox News on its pay TV platform and restore regional sports network YES after a year without what is the exclusive TV home of the New York Yankees. There are a number of retans disputes continuing right now, all of which may be resolved by next week.
There is an increasing trend for “smart” WiFi systems to be launched, to either give better control to customers of to dynamically select the right WiFi channels for the nest results. Linksys has added one this week it calls the Velop which creates a mesh network, using 802.11ac Wave II WiFi with can work as an extender bridge or router. It uses DFS to continually re-select the least cluttered channel and allows voice control using Amazon Alexa devices.
At the same time, D-Link has launched two new whole-home WiFi systems, the Covr and the Covr PowerLine, which we assume uses IEEE 1905.1 powerline bridge standard. It is a single router system though and does not offer multiple Access Points. Both use new Qualcomm Atheros chips.
UK maritime VSAT firm NSSLGlobal, has acquired Norwegian IPTV company SnapTV, a company delivering entertainment services for maritime and offshore companies. The two will jointly offer satellite delivered infotainment on ships.
Meanwhile WuakiTV, the streaming service now owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, says that its European users have reached four million, rising by one million from a year ago, and it operates across Spain, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. It says revenues went up by 50%.
Roku at CES this week claimed that after just two years its Roku TV program accounted for 13% of all US smart TV sales, so that one in eight smart TV purchases from Hisense, Hitachi, Insignia, Sharp and TCL can offer Roku content. Last month it launched in Mexico on 100 TV Models.
Dish Network has unveiled Dish Music, which can run on any Hopper set top to synch music throughout a home. Dish Music enables popular streaming sources iHeartRadio, Pandora, Tidal, Deezer and Amazon Music on Hopper 2 or Hopper 3 DVRs, and Joey clients. Surely what it needs is Spotify and Apple Music?
Canadian online video specialist Brightcove has partnered with Evergent Technologies to accelerate delivery and monetization of OTT and IPTV video services for broadcasters, operators and telcos. Well they won’t be the last to do it, but they are certainly nothing like the first. The system will use Brightcove’s online video platform and Evergent’s cloud-based service management system.
A report out this week from Research and Markets suggests that the conditional access market will grow to $5.53 Billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 9.1% and segments it into internet services, television and digital radio, as well as smartcard based CAS and card-less CAS.
Research and Markets has also published a report which forecasts the Global Flat Panel Display Equipment Market, basically equipment that LCD and LED Screen makers need to buy to make panels. To us this market is so fragmented that it is 6 or 7 markets all rising and falling separately. It says that the global FPD equipment market will grow at a CAGR of 0.92% during the period 2017-2021. It mostly covers displays for notebooks, smartphones, tablets, and TVs and says AMOLED is the future. Ho Hum, clearly not a growth market.
The Streaming Video Alliance plans to create an open caching standard and best practices guide for streaming video, and this week announced trials are set to begin. Alliance members including Charter, Limelight, MLBAM, Qwilt, Verizon, Viacom, ViaSat and Yahoo, will put open caching systems in place for the trial and then report back to a working group. Open caching is just like a CDN, but for carrying other people’s video more efficiently across your network, rather than for the video owner.
French CDN supplier Broadpeak and French set top middleware player Wyplay said at CES they would offer a joint solution which would “revolutionize the distribution of live TV Everywhere services,” when they travel over managed networks. It seems that the nanoCDN of Broadpeak will use space on set tops controlled by Wyplay, for the operator’s benefit. Broadpeak has talked about this before on numerous occasions.
TiVo says it has a deal with Home Box Office, part of Time Warner for an intellectual property license, licensing all of TiVo’s patents and the OTT video patents it holds in conjunction with Intellectual Ventures. In December, it announced a similar deal with Netflix. Back in February as Rovi, it signed a deal with Intellectual Ventures for patents which relate to OTT video delivery, combined them with its own, and took responsibility for going out to the OTT community to get cash from them. Looks like the plan is working, although we are struggling to locate any significant patents that TiVo or IV holds in OTT.
US RF chip specialist MaxLinear has landed a deal that is likely to deliver a strong 2017 all on its own, providing RF circuits for a HiSilicon reference design for UHD cable set tops, which use its full spectrum capture facility. Huawei, one of the leading suppliers of set tops in Asia, owns HiSilicon, and it could deliver a huge market share in China’s cable market for MaxLinear if it decides to use this reference design.
The South Korean government says it wants to deregulate the pay TV industry so that mergers and acquisitions among cable TV, satellite broadcasting and IPTV operators are legal. One of the issues is that currently only 33% control can be in common across all these types of companies. As a first step, it wants all cablecos to get digital only as soon as possible.
Nvidia has released a $200 Android based, streaming media player, which supports games, a new version of Shield TV which will work with 4K video. It wants to work with SVoD suppliers like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play Movies and Vudu. It is strongest in gaming, as its history would suggest, and promises to add AI capabilities. It plans to offer a customized version for China.
Chinese phone maker Xiaomi, has licensed the essential patents behind the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) from the Via Licensing controlled patent pool. Xiami joins 800 other licensees.
TiVo has walked into the programmatic advertising market, more usually associated with companies like Adobe, in announcing its own Audience Management Platform (AMP) to optimize audience targeting and data-driven TV. The platform is a data-agnostic system and enables revenue management executives, media planners and service providers to increase profitability through more precise, data-driven audience targeting and more effective ad inventory allocation.
Sony Electronics announced two new 4K HDR TV series – a flagship XBR-A1E Bravia OLED and XBR-X930E/X940E series TVs. The first is powered by Sony’s 4K HDR Processor X1 Extreme, and uses its Acoustic Surface sound system. Sony has taken more than a dozen years to bring OLED to market and has had false promise after false promise, and although it says this is its first OLED TV, it launched a 23-inch device about 8 years ago at CES, which sank without trace. The other series is a low-end LED backlit system, and both run Android.
Hulu this week said it had a content deal with CBS, one of the major US broadcast networks which is not one of its parents. It will carry CBS channels including sports channels carrying NFL and Basketball and major annual live events such as The GRAMMYs. Hulu also extended its existing deal with Showtime Networks, part of CBS.