Limewire, the most recalcitrant of all of the P2P file sharing services, which is still counter suing the record labels, said it has launched a legal digital music store selling MP3 tracks, this week, beginning with music from IRIS Distribution and Nettwerk Productions with none of the big record labels in sight. LimeWire will offer songs ‘a la carte’ or as part of a monthly subscription.
Arvato Mobile and EMI Music have signed a European-wide license for the full EMI portfolio to sell tracks to mobile customers throughout Europe. Arvato is a subsidiary of Bertelsmann and has had a relationship with most of the record labels for two years. It sells the music as videotones, artist wallpapers, realtones, ringback tones and full-track downloads.
UK IPTV supplier Inuk Networks said this week that it has added games and interactive services to the Freewire IPTV platform that it makes available mostly free to students through the academic network. The company has partnered with Stockholm Accedo Broadband, a content aggregator, which will provide its Funspot games platform. Some games will be free of charge which will be supplemented over time with premium interactive games.
Advertising conglomerate Universal McCann has released a survey saying that display and video advertising on handsets is found to be irritating by 61% of a sample of 9,500 cellular users across 21 countries. It should have asked how many people feel that way about free to air TV, and we think it may have got a surprise. The agency said that paid-for branded content, was much more acceptable with 71% saying that’s fine. Universal called for Facebook and MySpace to rethink beyond advertising and charging for subscriptions.
Verimatrix has launched a version of its VCAS conditional access system for cable IPTV – TV services offered over cable infrastructure but which use it as a single shared IP pipe. Such systems are widely used in the Asia Pacific region, but have not been adopted in Verimatrix’ native US. The company also said that it has a ‘three screens’ strategy, adding content protection for mobile TV using 3G streaming delivery or DVB-H, we suspect adhering to DVB Open Framework specifications. It also has a version of VCAS for DVB which will support satellite, cable or terrestrial TV services, it says, although as far as we know it has no clients in those technologies as yet.
It looks like Irish DRM player Latens is getting into the IPTV platform business and will launch a new IPTV Service Delivery Platform, with its DRM system bundled, at this year’s IBC. It says that it will be scalable from 100,000 subscribers to millions of set tops. The platform integrates established, standards-based STB client, middleware and browser technology and is primarily aimed at larger IPTV operators. Can’t wait to hear Latens tell us what standard middleware is.
Last Thursday you Skype users out there will have had a nasty surprise when your free phone service stopped working. The disruption was triggered by a routine set of patches from Microsoft making a huge number of Skypies restart their application at once with a re-boot. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of P2P resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact. But being the first disruption in four years it’s better than many paid services and Skype is going to give away free Skype out calls to compensate.
On2 Technologies says that it has licensed its VP6 codec to Media Excel a provider of a system for transcoding content between mobile TV, Web TV and IPTV. Media Excel will implement On2’s TrueMotion VP6 digital video encoding on its DSP-based transcoder acceleration module, which is the basis for its Hera appliance family.
Cult music icon Peter Gabriel, musician turned online music doyen has now turned his hand to a music recommendation site, injecting $5million into The Filter to help develop its expansion into new areas such as digital video and film content. The service can identify around 5 million songs and suggest other music you might like and was developed at UK based Exabre and is adding 25,000 new users a month. Gabriel says the company will turn its software into a generalized recommendation engine, for everything from television shows to bottles of wine and fashion items.
Versatel Belgium and Tele2 Belgium which between them have 200,000 fixed telephony customers and 125,000 broadband connections have been acquired from operator Tele2, by Netherlands incumbent KPN for €95 million ($128 million).
TeliaSonera, the broadly based Nordic telco is going to acquire Latvian operator Latvijas Mobilais Telefons (LMT), taking its shareholding up to 100% from 60%, by buying the shares the Republic of Latvia and Lattelecom. At the same time TeliaSonera will acquire the Latvian government holdings in Lattelecom, and sell these and its own shares back to Lattelecom management to complete its own buy out.
US chipmaker LSI has sold off its mobility products business to Infineon for $450 million in cash, plus a performance-based payment of up to $50 million more, payable in the first quarter of 2009. The deal came about as LSI conducted a strategic review of its businesses since its merger with Agere Systems. LSI wants to spend more of its effort on its storage and networking semiconductors.
Microsoft has cut the price of its Xbox 360 by 13% in Europe, following on from a recent price cut in the US, stimulated by PS3 price cuts. The Xbox 360 with a 20GB hard drive will fall by €50 to €350.
Advanced TV reports that Telefonica has begun DTH satellite TV services in Brazil in parallel with its IPTV services launched there. It is selling it as a hybrid, with a broadband Internet connection and free local calls bundled and an 18 channel pay-TV package for $35 for a promotional period rising to $60. The pay TV element can be delivered either by satellite or via cable or MMDS network.
Telegent Systems, which designs low-power RF CMOS chips for mobile TV applications, mostly for DVB-H, has raised $20 million in a third round financing through Northern Light Venture Capital plus previous investors. Telegent has now raised a total of $50 million.
Viacom’s MTV Networks will invest $500 million in video games over the next two years, incorporating games into all new TV properties at their inception, Reuters reported this week. The company currently operates game related services including AddictingGames.com, Xfire, GameTrailers, Neopets.com and Nicktropolis and its game sites had 42 million unique visitors in June. Now it plans to launch a ‘Guitar Hero’ styled title called ‘Rock Band.’