UK broadband researcher Point Topic says that global broadband lines have reached 298 million at the end of the first quarter, with year-on-year growth of 28.7% taking global broadband penetration to just 5.68%. Point Topic notes that Asia-Pacific and North America are more or less saturated and that Eastern Europe has the highest growth rate at 10.2%.
Orchard Enterprises a distributor of digital music has merged with the Digital Music Group this week and says the combined business will retain DMGI’s Nasdaq listing but the company will change its name to The Orchard. In effect it is a reverse takeover with Orchard management taking charge and the Orchard content delivery platform being used. The resulting company having revenues of around $17 million, and will have operations in 25 countries, currently they both make losses.
Sony Pictures in Europe says that it has shipped around 180,000 Blu-ray disks and attributes this to the launch of the Sony PlayStation 3 in Europe and the recently announced deal that video rental chain Blockbuster has chosen the Blu-ray format.
Telefonica was fined after all €152 million by the European Commission despite the attempted and public intervention of its the Spanish CMT regulator. Telefonica is said to have charged excess fees for wholesale ADSL, but will appeal the ruling.
Nielsen SoundScan points out that sales of albums when sold as digital files has grown in the US by 60% in the first half of 2007 to 23.5 million units, but this has not made up for the continued reduction in CD sales which fell 19.3% to 205.7 million units. Nielsen confirms that Apple still dominates the online sales.
Market leading Israeli-UK based conditional access firm NDS has landed a deal with Inteleca, a triple-play operator in Siberia, Russia, to provide its VideoGuard Express system for the launch of digital cable TV services in the region. NDS says that VideoGuard is installed on more than 72 million set top boxes worldwide and that this system also includes its set top MediaHighway middleware.
This week various news reports told about the Microholas Project whereby the University of Berlin, the Budapest University of Technology and the Economics and Universita Politecnica delle Marche in Italy have used holographic storage to put 500GB of data on an ordinary high definition DVD, around 10 times their intended storage. Holographic storage has been looking for a cheap format for archival storage for some years, with the main trick to fire two separate lasers across each other, and where they intersect to write in 3 dimensions, creating extra layers of data. The target for the Blu-ray DVD work is 1 Terabyte, but this has already been exceeded by other proprietary holographic systems out there, so we’re not quite sure how valuable this research will become.
DirecTV has been promising 1500 new local and national High Definition TV channels for two years now, and its new DirecTV 10 satellite was launched this week. The satellite will be switched on for public use in September, delivering the first of the national HD channels.
Alcatel-Lucent has yet another test of the DVB-SH mobile TV standard which has launched in the South West part of France from June to September 2007. The satellite based service also needs gap filler transmitters on the ground which are best placed on existing cellular base station towers, so it is working with French cellular operator SFR, Vodafone’s French partner, for this.
IPTV video services will rise by a factor of 34 times from 2006 to 2011, says US researcher iSuppli putting the market for IPTV video services at $26 billion by 2011, up from $779 million today. Value-added offerings such as digital music, on-demand gaming, data services, home security will add more than $1 billion to the pile and IPTV will still have considerable room for expansion after that. But with a sobering note iSuppli adds that it is very likely that the entire worldwide IPTV industry in 2011 will not be as large as Comcast is on its own.
Streamezzo, the Paris-based provider of mobile streaming, has partnered handset maker Nokia to develop MyNseries, a multimedia platform for Nokia’s N-series family of mobile devices. Under the terms of the partnership, Streamezzo was responsible for leading the design, development, delivery management, hosting, and deployment of the MyNseries application which is now launched as an S60 application for the Symbian mobile operating system offering news, UGC photos and videos, music, navigation, games and internet browsing.
iSuppli is also forecasting the market or premium mobile content and says it will reach $44 billion by 2011, double the $20 billion run rate it has today, taking in mobile music, games, graphics, video and adult content and it says that India leads the growth of this market with an annual growth rate of 40% plus, but that Italy will be the fastest growing in Europe at 29%. Ringtones are the strongest revenue today, but video will later dominate.
Lenovo has added UltraWideBand personal area networking to one of its latest ThinkPad, the laptop PCs it inherited when it bought IBM’s PC division. The Ultrawideband has been added to support next generation wireless connectivity at 100Mbps, a bit slow for UWB we thought, and likely to have come out of an early chip from one of the WiMEDIA Alliance players.
The UK Competition Commission confirmed it would investigate the purchase by BSkyB earlier this year of a 17.9% stake in UK broadcaster ITV. The Commission will look into the broader issue of whether or not media ownership in the UK has fallen into too few hands. BSkyB bought the stake to prevent Virgin Media from acquiring ITV, paying £940 million ($1.9 billion) last November.
Motorola’s figures are in the news again with handset sales falling once again in Asia and Europe, and the company confessing that it will miss its lowered revenues targets and make a loss for the quarter and only a tiny profit for the year. Calls for the head of CEO Ed Zander have already been renewed and the company will now shoot for between $8.6 billion and $8.7 billion of revenues.
Texas Instruments was delighted to remind the world that by working with two of China’s leading telecommunications companies in ZTE and Datang Mobile, it has landed the majority of DSP chip supply to date for China’s Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) trials in the Node B base station equipment. Trials began in April in 10 China cities and the home grown 3G technology is supposed to be in place in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. ZTE and Datang Mobile have been awarded 83% of the base station orders issued, which gives TI a huge head start in one of the most important markets in the world.
Downloadable web based applications for the iPhone are appearing thick and fast, with Microsoft Office support coming from gOffice, a web-based alternative to Office at http://www.goffice.com/ and BeeJive’s JiveTalk chat software as well as Trillian Astra from Cerulean Studios. Since they are all just web apps, we will be inundated with this for weeks.
Both Samsung and LG Electronics this week have brought out handsets for the European market that can automatically accommodate YouTube, after LG announced a deal with YouTube allowing users to view videos and easily upload them directly to YouTube.com, Samsung trumped the announcement, saying that it would deliver its handsets in Europe a full month earlier than LG.