Elevation Partners the $1.9 billion private equity firm has acquired SDI Media Group, which claims it’s the world’s largest provider of subtitling and language dubbing services to the entertainment industry. Perhaps the idea is that online entertainment will need rapid translation into hundreds of different languages, a trend that took off in the Dotcom boom, as entertainment goes online. SDI offers software for managing subtitles, 650 employees and 4,000 freelancers around the world.
Not quite sure why Orca the IPTV middleware provider has never opened a US office, perhaps its because it had plans for partnership with both Lucent and then with Nortel, but it is now operating out of the US and has its first customer in the shape of WT Services, a subsidiary of the West Texas Rural Telephone Cooperative. That deal includes live TV multicast, pay-per-view and video on demand (VOD). Until recently you would have bet that all of these local US deals would have gone to rival Minerva. Orca will work with Optibase for encoders, who was the prime contractor, and BitBand for VoD, and Widevine for DRM.
BET Networks, a US cable network and a division of Viacom, has struck a deal to offer ad supported online video services using Brightcove. The deal is the first in the UK that Brightcove has announced since opening an office there. BET will serve this video from BETonBlast.co.uk and use Brightcove’s viral promotion features.
Harmonic says that SatLink Communications, a leading teleport based in Israel, has expanded its channel capacity with a new transport using Harmonic’s DiviCom Electra 1000 multi-channel MPEG-2 encoders, the ProStream 1000 with DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing and NMX Digital Service Manager. SatLink provides content distribution services and is backed by the Eurocom Group, Barak013 and Globecast.
The annual value of pan-European online advertising is set to reach €16 billion by 2012, double what it is today says a study by Forrester Research. Online adverts will take an 18% market share with the UK leading over the next four years, ahead of Germany and France. European internet users now spend 14.3 hours a week online, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV, and 4.4 hours reading newspapers or magazines, the research group said.
The Italian Government has had its proposals approved by the European Commission for providing subsidies of up to €200 to residents who purchase digital tuners for their TV sets ahead of digital switchover in Italy. Legislation is required before the subsidies can be approved and the plan is to rush this through in time for the next football season, when the set tops go on sale.
Telefonica has made a $4 billion bid to take control at Vivo, the Brazilian mobile carrier that it owns with Portugal Telecom. The UK Financial Times newspaper quoted Telefonica chairman Cesar Alierta, saying that his company has given Portugal Telecom until the end of the month to accept.
Do you remember the ridiculous idea that Virgin Mobile US had about offering free mobile credits in return for watching adverts? Well it says the Sugar Mama promotion, as it was called, has led to 1,000 new subs each
day since it was launched taking the number above 300,000, almost 7% of its customer base, so perhaps not quite such a silly idea. The customers have to exchange 45 seconds of advertising for each extra minute of talk time, and Virgin says that this has meant giving up 9 million minutes of talk, but it doesn’t say how much it has received for the advertising.
Alcatel-Lucent has signed a two year deal to build a WiMAX network in the 3.4GHz to 3.6GHz bands, in France with SHD, a joint venture between the Vivendi-Vodafone owned SFR cellular operator and Neuf Cegetel. It will use the mobile version of WiMAX in the Ile-de-France (IDF) and Provence-Alpes-C’te d’Azur (PACA) regions and be operational by mid-2009. It has already built a trial system in Paris.
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit said that it would not delay implementation of the Copyright Royalty Board’s recent decision to increase Internet radio royalties to a $500 per-channel minimum. However Sound Exchange, the organization set up by record labels to collect the royalties said it won’t enforce the new rates immediately and will give room for yet another round of talks and further agreements to be hammered out. It has also offered a cap of $50,000 a year for larger webcasters.
Sony BMG has finally gone after the company that got it in that terrible mess over using a PC rootkit in its CD copy protection, suing the Amergence Group, which was previously known as SunnComm. Sony is seeking $12 million in damages, alleging ‘negligence and unfair business practices after agreeing to pay $5.75 million to settle litigation related to the CD recall. This is likely to be the death of Amergence which was never more than a three man company to start with.
BSkyB in the UK may not get many new subscribers these days, but like all good pay TV businesses it still drives its revenue engine with upgrades and increased ARPU. It added 90,000 subs last quarter to end on 8.6 million, but added 207,000 Sky+ households, which is its DVR offering, bringing that up to 2.4 million. Its multiroom system is now taken in 1.3 million homes but HD services are more disappointing adding only 48,000 subs, taking the total to just 292,000. Sky Broadband jumped an impressive 259,000 up to 716,000.
London IPTV addressable advertising pioneer Packet Vision said that it has joined Juniper Network’s J-Partner Solutions Alliance Program to offer its advertising systems as part of a bundle of services geared to the IPTV industry. Packet Vision and Juniper will engage in joint marketing and sales efforts targeting IPTV operators in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Kulabyte has launched a multi-core system for encoding video based on
the company’s TimeSlice video encoding technology, which enables faster-than-real-time video encoding. The system is geared up for encoding VP6 video for Flash 8 delivery and will cost $5,500 for the standard 4-core version and offer 2-pass variable bit rate encoding, for both live and on-demand video.
Coding Technologies says that the European Broadcasting Union has tested its MPEG-4 aacPlus audio codec, and it has emerged as a clear winner in a recent multi-channel audio test. The EBU ran blind testing with listeners, who selected the highest audio quality at a variety of data rates. The listening test determined that aacPlus, at bit rates between 128 and
192 kbps, outperformed all other surround sound codecs.
On2 Technologies has released a new version of its flagship Flix Engine video encoding software designed for servers with multi-core processors. The Flix Engine can use multiple processor cores to encode video in parallel, resulting in substantially faster video encoding speed with a single Flix Engine. It claims that a 720P high-definition video file can be encoded at 1.4 times faster than real-time on a processor with eight cores.
We said as we introduced the idea a few weeks back that Telefonica and Sogecable would merge their pay TV effort, that they were asking for competition authorities to interfere, and now it looks like that’s about to happen according to a report in Telecom Paper. In 2003 Telefonica and Sogecable were investigated over the acquisition of broadcasting rights to Spanish football and banned for four years from offering anything together. The ban ends in November and they have scheduled the merging of their IPTV service for then so they can each offer the other’s pay TV service.
UK set top maker Pace Micro Technology said that the Board now expects profit before tax for the shortened 2007 year to be significantly ahead of current market expectations of £8 million ($16 million). This is due to further progress on product approvals for its US customer base and anticipated increased volumes to a US customer. The will almost certainly be sales made to Comcast, which bought $500 million of set tops from Pace, to work with Motorola’s conditional access system.
NDS the conditional access supplier mostly owned by News Corp has signed an agreement with Qualcomm to build a Simulcrypt Synchronizer into MediaFLO’s reference platform so that multiple conditional access systems can be used on the same MediaFLO implementation. That was necessary so that Verizon and AT&T could both use the system by the end of the year, and shows that the MediaFLO eco-system still has the odd hole here and there compared to DVB-H which has a simulcast installation running in Italy already.
P2P web TV provider Babel Networks which runs Babelgum, has signed 30 new content deals for its web TV service, including big names like the BBC and Reuters, as well independent film makers and the company says it is on the way to building a library of 100,000 hours of independent and mainstream content. Other deals included extreme action, short films and animation, boxing, cult films and Japanese Anime.
KPN says that it will cut the basic charges for its IPTV service Digitenne from €9.95 a month to €6.95 a month which includes 50 TV and 75 radio channels.
Samsung Electronics profits fell 5% in the second quarter, but ridiculously its share price rose on the unlikely idea that a hostile takeover was about to be mounted. Anyone you know have a few $100 billion? The report ran in the Chosun Ilbo Korean newspaper, and US investor Carl Icahn is supposed to be behind the plan. Pure fantasy, but funny.