Alcatel-Lucent says it has acquired Tamblin, a privately held company specializing in interactive entertainment. Alcatel will add Tamblin to its existing interactive TV applications and its 13 staff will join Alcatel’s convergence business activities within its multimedia and payments team.
UTStarcom has announced that it has signed a contract to supply its RollingStream end-to-end IPTV solution to Indian telco Bharti Airtel for the launch of IPTV services in the country. The software will enable Bharti to offer live broadcast IPTV programs and VOD, to its 46 million customer base.
Getting over its failure to buy Tandberg last year, US Arris Group will pay $730 million in a mixture of cash and stock for VoD specialist C-COR creating a combined company with revenues over $1.2 billion. The price represents a 19% premium on the recent C-COR trading average, and the deal will close in January if someone else doesn’t come along and make a better offer, as Ericsson did last time.
SK Telecom, the South Korean mobile operator, said this week that it will work with Germany’s T-Systems, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, to jointly enter the mobile TV broadcasting market in Europe and Asia. It will not specialize in any one technology but work on several. SK Telecom is the largest shareholder in TU Media which runs the S-DMB service in Korea. SK Telecom also said this week that it is prepared to invest up to $270 million in MVNO Helio, which it owns with Earthlink. Helio has 130,000 subscribers, and hopes to rise this to over 200,000 by year end with revenues above $140 million.
Sprint and Microsoft collaborated in mobile search last November and now have taken the Tellme voice search which Microsoft bought in March and added it to the Sprint mobile search service. As we understand it, it will respond to voice commands and use GPS to look up where you are and respond with maps or local services in search results. Sounds cool actually.
Ruckus Wireless has landed Singapore’s SingTel as a customer for its MediaFlex Smart Wi-Fi system to enable wireless distribution of its mio TV IPTV service around a home. Ruckus has already built up a portfolio of customers in Europe and Asia including Belgacom, PCCW, Fastweb, Telef’nica in Chile and the Czech Republic and Pioneer Telephone US.
We read the release from mobile chipmaker Siano Mobile Silicon and middleware supplier Axel Technologies, saying that they had got channel change time on a DVB-H system down to 2 seconds, just like MediaFLO, and immediately emailed off to them, pointing out that surely this was all a function of how wide the multiplex was or how the time slice interval is set, not how fast the chip works. Siano says that’s only 1 second of the time, the rest is how long it takes to lock onto the channel, for the middleware to work and for the codec to decode, which the two have now got down to another 1 second.
The wholesale division of BT Group is going to work with Orange in the UK to provide landline services so that Orange customers can have a mobile, fixed line, broadband and TV services. The agreement will allow Orange to offer a fixed-line telephony service under its own brand but managed and maintained by BT Wholesale.
Some US cable subscribers, and a well known US anti-trust lawyer have got together to challenge US cable operators in a class-action suit designed to stop cable operators only selling expensive bundles and instead allowing channels to be acquired a la carte, one channel at a time apart from the basic cable bundle.
US cable operator Comcast, the biggest pay TV service in the US says it will acquire Seattle based BuddyTV, a community site featuring TV news, reviews and interviews,
iBiquity Digital, the developer of digital HD Radio technology, said this week that 1,500 Radio station have gone live using its digital HD radio technology. The 1,500th station was Clear Channel’s rock station WROV-FM 96.3 in Roanoke, Virginia. HD Radio is a way of broadcasting both an analog and digital signal side by side in the same spectrum which used to offer just analog radio.
We did ask the question a few weeks back about whether or not the freeze to US debt markets caused by its problems with mortgages might slow down Private Equity transactions, and five months after announcing the deal, Harman International Industries, a manufacturer of audio products and electronic systems, said that the group of private equity firms which were buying it in an $8 billion acquisition have now pulled out.
US publication Communications Day, told the world last week that search-engine Google will form a trans-Pacific cable consortium to build a cable, presumably to carry its searches across from the US to Asia Pac.
US coffee shop chain Starbucks said this week it will give away 50 million free iTunes downloads from October on, distributing 1.5 million Song of the Day gift cards throughout its 10,000 locations.
DRM supplier Verimatrix, said this week that it will provide content protection for the first IPTV service in Qatar through Qtel.
The new version of the leading Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming title Halo 3, has been found leaked online ahead of its official launch.
Germany has finally passed a law, several year late, that enacts the World Copyright Treaty based on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to breach copyright protection, even without an intent to copy content.
Telekom Austria has halved prices in its AON IPTV service to a basic fee of just €4.90 a month ($ 6.90) for 49 channels. An additional bouquet of 17 channels costs a further €7.90 ($11). The move came to undercut local cable operator pricing.
US DRM specialist Widevine Technologies, has put out a Widevine CableCard, in the hope of getting into the cable TV conditional access business. The CableCard initiative was set by the FCC to separate set top hardware from its protection software, and opens the door for companies like Widevine, to break into cable, which until now was a pure IPTV DRM company.
Sony has put off the launch of its online virtual world service, which it calls Home, for the PlayStation 3 console. It will now be launched in Spring next year and is delayed to improve the service. Sony Home is designed to enable PS3 users to create characters, buy items, play games and communicate with other players.
The French Government and the German Kartel office have each okayed their respective DVB-H services. The French government had to sign a decree to select the standard, and the German anti-trust authority had to say it was okay for a consortium of mobile operators to work together on mobile TV.
The US DISH network is breaking into the TV retail business, selling Sharp Aquos LCD TVs between 26 and 65 inches wide, to DISH customers for huge discounts up to $800.
For the first time, commercial vendors and individual consumers will be able to legally create CSS copy-protected DVDs for playback on existing DVD players. The Board of Directors of the DVD Copy Control Association
(DVD CCA) gave final approval for this innovative use of the technology this week of an idea that was announced last August, to create CSS protected DVDs for applications like in-store kiosks.