Vodafone in the Netherlands has introduced Microsoft Windows Live Messenger as a free application for mobile phones so that cellular users can talk directly to the 6 million active PC based Messenger users there. Service is free until 31 December 2007 then goes to €0.75 per 15 minutes, around $1. Vodafone announced in February that it would gradually move country by country over to using Messenger.
Verizon has said that it will sue the Federal Communications Commission which regulates US spectrum markets in the US for saying that some of the 700 MHz spectrum freed up from switching broadcast TV signals to digital, will be offered for attachment of any type of device which wants to use it, as long as it doesn’t damage the network. That wording has been carefully borrowed from ancient US legislation relating to operators wanting to deny device makers the right to attach their products to US networks. Verizon said that the mandate for ‘open platforms for devices and applications’ violates the Constitution, exceeds the FCC’s authority and is ‘arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by substantial evidence and otherwise contrary to law.’ It is also in Faultline’s view, fair to consumers, protecting them from overpriced and capricious telcos.
IPTV middleware supplier Minerva Networks said this week that several US incumbent local telcos including Connexion Technologies and Paul Bunyan Telephone, have selected Minerva’s new iTVManager 3.0 platform for their IPTV middleware.
Bharti Telemedia, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, said this week it has chosen Tandberg Television to supply a headend for the launch of its new Direct to Home (DTH) satellite TV service in India. Bharti will use the iSIS 8000 IP head-end and MPEG-4 AVC standard definition encoders.
Yahoo this week said that it will spend $300 million to acquire BlueLithium, a fast growing online global ad network which offers direct response capabilities to advertisers and publishers. BlueLithium is the fifth largest ad network in the US with 145 million unique visitors each month which uses internet behavior to decide which adverts should be served to users.
Toshiba top executives this week unveiled a plan to overtake Samsung as the world’s largest maker of NAND Flash memory chips. Toshiba partners with US retail and controller partner SanDisk and currently has a 28% NAND flash compared to Samsung’s 46%. Hynix is in third place with just 15% and Intel and its partner Micron are just in the process of ramping production to challenge these leaders. Toshiba will speed up spending plans to the point where it can process 60,000 wafers a month, compared with its original target of 35,000 by bringing online a new plant by the middle of next year
Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he will appeal the court ruling that struck down a law inspired personally by him to ban the sale of video games depicting violence to minors. It was struck down as being unconstitutional last month and he has been considering whether or not to appeal. The law, put in place in 2005, prohibits the sale of violent games to anyone under the age of 18.
Billboard magazine reports that executives from Apple and many of the major record labels will meet with the European Commission this week to discuss the iTunes Music Store. The Commission thinks iTunes may be in violation of competition rules in Europe because Apple operates separate iTunes stores across Europe using slightly different pricing and content.
The Department of Justice in the US has come out in favor of the idea of telcos charging content providers premium prices to prioritize some web traffic. This is the exact opposite of what Net Neutrality supporters want, and the DoJ said that Neutrality would discourage operators from building or expanding their networks and that it was best for regulators not to get involved. The FCC may choose to ignore the DoJ’s opinion however.
AOL said this week that it has completed its acquisition of Tacoda, a specialist in targeting advertising on the internet, based on surfing behavior, a technology euphemistically known as behavioral targeting and largely frowned upon by civil liberties groups. AOL announced the deal back in July and Tacoda will operate at arms length as a subsidiary of AOL.
Spain’s Semiconductores Investigaci’n y Dise’o SA better known as Sidsa said this week it is working with Iran to distribute TV signals to handsets using DVB-H technology. It will build a 16 channel network supplying the headend and taking satellite delivered channels from Intelsat and Eutelsat and send them out to a Sagem handset. The Iranian National Radio and TV Network (IRIB) will supply some of the channels.
The US House of Representatives has passed the contentious patent reform bill which is really designed to reduce the amount of court time in the US given over to intellectual property disputes. It will achieve this by making it easier to challenge a patent in the first year it is allocated, and changing patent rules so they belong to the first company to file a patent, rather than the first company to claim to invent the technology, in line with the rest of the international community. That way big companies can’t patent after smaller, overseas companies and claim they had invented it first. The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate.
The Sony BMG merger is now approved by European regulators after initially being okayed by the European Commission and then annulled by the European Court of First Instance a year ago. The deal was announced in late 2003 and is still not entirely cleared.
Apple wants to both slash the price of TV series on its iTunes store and also offer films as rentals rather than purchases. Apple has proposed that TV episodes would halve in price to just $0.99, said a report in Variety magazine and Apple would also adopt the defunct Movielink business model of offering a 30 day film rental for around $2.99. It is unclear if Apple will go the whole hog and delete the film 24 hours after viewers begin watching it, as Movielink and CinemaNow do, but if it doesn’t, then why should they?
Both News Corp and CBS have come out during the past week and said that they have no plans to deprive Apple’s iTunes of their content in the way that NBC has pulled its content from the end of this year. Both say they are happy with the service and its pricing policy. NBC is reported to want to bundle les popular (bad) films with more popular (good) films and charge double, something Apple naturally resisted.
Forrester Research says that the big four US broadcast TV networks ABC, FOX , NBC and CBS will earn $800 million from online TV shows during 2008 and that this figure will continue to rise rapidly.
Alcatel-Lucent cut its revenue forecast for the year last week, saying revenue would be flat, rather than grow in the mid-single digits. It expects weaker wireless spending in the US, and it will now only break even in the current quarter.
In the US, Sling Media distributes its Sling Box without the help of any operators, and those operators probably don’t like the idea very much, but UPC, the Netherlands cable TV arm of Liberty Global has taken the device. The Sling Box takes the analog output from a TV set, re-digitizes and encrypts it and squirts it down a line to wherever you are, over a broadband line to your PC or cellular phone.
Gracenote has acquired the Musicphone technology from the San Francisco privately held company of the same name, which allows a handset owner to dial a special number, set the handset to listen, and identify any song being played, and then offer to sell the handset owner a copy.
NTT DoCoMo has just announced that it will offer flat-rate data plans from October across its networks. The plan has various rates for HSDPA packet services, capped at 500,000 packets a month, costing just $36 a month in Japan. If more packets are used the amount rises to a maximum $91 a month.
As if to underline what we’ve been saying all along about Clearwire not being just a US network, it has launched in Spain, as Instant Internet (Instanet) in the Seville area, with a reach of around 300,000 households, using WiMAX technology.
Barely days old Hulu, the video web site joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal, has already made an acquisition, buying video distribution company Mojiti, says TechCrunch, for around $10 million. Neither company has officially confirmed the deal. Mojiti is privately held and US owned, but runs its business out of China, offering UGC video.