In order to retain parity in all the promising areas of advertising Google has been long overdue a move against the in-game advertising dominance of Microsoft, with its Massive Inc acquisition. That is now largely expected this month with a strategy to be laid out for AdScape the $23 million Google acquisition which tech blog GigaOm says will involve embedding 15-second, pre-roll and mid-roll video ads in some of Bunchball’s casual games, some of which will run as Facebook applications. It will also offer a free ad supported version of the game Psychonauts, also with video ads.
US researcher In-Stat says that the market for putting semiconductors into handsets will remain in growth going forwards and in 2007 will reach $31 billion in revenue, with Bluetooth an enduring favorite. In-Stat says handset semiconductor revenue will rise to reach $32.2 billion by 2012 with Bluetooth and GPS, growing faster than core handset components. It also predicts that the average price of the core semiconductors in an HSPA
handset will drop from $61 last year 2006 to $14.6 in 2012.
UK independent broadcaster ITV has told the UK Competition Commission that it wants BSkyB to be forced to sell its shares in the rival company, citing its ability to influence ITV’s decisions, especially those involving future acquisitions, as a weakening of competition. Sky has said it will sue if it is made to sell at a loss. ITV says that a number of target acquisitions have been identified that will make it directly competitive with Sky, including independent production companies, and its involvement in free satellite service Freesat. It wants the Sky stake down from around 19% now to 4.9% and a promise that Sky would not seek a member on its board. Sky has offered a drop to 14.9%. Long way to go.
Macrovision the DRM and analog content protection market leader, this week said it has a definitive agreement to acquire All Media Guide Holdings, a provider of databases and metadata for entertainment products which support content recognition, discovery and management. All Media Guide offers reviews, biographies, ratings, images, titles, credits, essays, and descriptions of music, movies and video games including eleven million song tracks and one million albums. Its data is often used to build content recommendation engines.
TiVo said this week that 20,000 of its customer households have volunteered to take part in an ongoing anonymous national consumer panel called PowerWatch, which TiVo will bring to market first with US media planning and buying specialist Starcom USA. It looks like it is trying to build a powerbase against Nielsen Media, which TiVo used to have a similar deal with ‘ we wonder what happened to that? TiVo will be conducting a quarterly survey of Power Watch and Starcom has the exclusive access to the first study and can add its own questions.
The Apple iPhone was launched in parts of Europe, including the UK and Germany last week as people once more queued through the night to be first to get their hands on an iPhone. A least 10,000 phones were sold in Germany on the first day but because of negotiation hold ups, France won’t get the iPhone until the end of the month.
French handset and set top maker Sagem, and VoD player BitBand are the other suppliers which have been selected by UNE-EPM Telecom in Colombia for its IPTV system. We had two weeks ago said that Orca Interactive had won the middleware contract.
Set top software company OpenTV, now a subsidiary of Nagravision, said this week that India’s Sun Direct TV has selected it to provide software for its new satellite TV Direct To Home set tops, including a collection of applications such as EPG, interactive sport, and multi-angle interactive news. Sun Direct TV will introduce a new DTH network in India using MPEG-4 and supported by Irdeto’s conditional access.
Tech blogs have panned NBC’s new NBC Direct site, which is supposed to offer downloads of its own TV programs. One of the biggest issues is that it only works with Windows using Internet Explorer and is only available in the US. There are also no facilities to download and sideload to handsets. The programming has a 48 hour viewing restriction and remains available for one week. Other critics pointed at a web design that only showed text and no graphics or video.
Two different sources cited in the press this week have Spanish DVB-T digital terrestrial TV converter boxes reaching very different install numbers with Andres Tejero, CEO of Veo TV saying it will be 9 million by year end, while Ricardo Alvari’o, deputy director of Spain’s Infrastructures and Technical Specifications, saying it will jump from 6.3 million now to 7 million by Christmas. Monthly sales are around 330,000 so the lower estimate is more likely. Either way it is another example of a European country where digital free to air TV is growing and will likely prevent pure pay TV systems like IPTV taking off quite so fast. Other countries also growing DTT at breakneck speed are the UK, Italy and France
Telecom Italia Group for its first three quarters of 2007 had revenues of €23.2 billion ($34 billion) up just 0.4% compared with the first nine months of 2006. Telecom Italia said that revenue growth was held back by changes in European regulations including new international roaming tariff rules. Its fixed line business fell 7.5%, and it was one of the few companies that went backwards in broadband, a drop of 4.6%, but said that it would have grown 8.1% if it had not been for the effects of having to offer non-geographical phone numbers under European legislation. Its TIM mobile subsidiary saw revenues fall 1.8% over the nine months, which it says would have been up 5.2% without regulatory changes. Brazilian operations grew 12.9% where it is the second largest mobile player.
Broadcom has signed an agreement with US gaming giant, Electronic Arts, to speed up EA Mobile game titles on mobile phones powered by Broadcom chips. The game titles will be optimized for the latest generation VideoCore multimedia processors. The Broadcom BCM2727 VideoCore offers low power for graphics powered by the OpenGL standard and claims rendering power of 32 million triangles a second. Broadcom says that mobile games on the handset can be played out on HDTV sets through an HDMI slot.
The writers strike in Hollywood goes from bad to worse, with 20th Century Fox and Paramount issuing breach of contract letters to employees that are on strike which are not purely writers. The strike looks like getting messy fast, because the stakes are high and the content that is already written and which can be filmed and finished, is in low supply. The move is aimed at writer-producers, who if they continue to work, can see existing scripts completed. Some of these have gone on strike because they also write.
Canadian IPTV software house Espial says that it has landed a tier one triple play supplier in Europe for its Evo IPTV Platform, on a contract worth $1.5 million. The customer who Espial cannot reveal is said to have over 1.5 million subscribers. Given that the largest IPTV customer in Europe is France Telecom with 872,000 homes, this means that the deal is NOT for an IPTV customer. Espial admits that it is a hybrid cable-IPTV service scheduled for deployment next year, and that contract revenues will be recognized then. It can’t then be Virgin Media, which has around 4 million customers, although it is experimenting with hybrid IPTV, but could be one of the other cable majors in France, Germany, Spain or Italy. We’ll keep you posted.
Orange Spain says that it is launching what it calls HDTV broadcasts via mobile handsets. We assume that this is the same as the Orange France HD mobile service, which has a baseline of 250 Kbps for mobile video, instead of 120 Kbps. This bandwidth is guaranteed for most of the time, but in the event of voice congestion the service can be throttled back. Channels will include MTV, National Geographic Channel and Sci Fi, plus some sports and will be free of charge for 3G or HSDPA handsets.