Research from TNS Media Intelligence suggests that 16% of consumers now watch entire episodes of TV shows on the internet, double the number from a similar survey conducted a year ago. TV shows have now replaced the news as the most widely viewed online content. Convenience and lack of adverts are cited as the major reason for this. About 66% of viewers stream content online and 40% download content for free.
The Leichtman Research Group says that 25% of US households have at least one TV set capable of receiving HD programming, but that only 53% of those actually get HD content. Another 22% believe that’s what they are viewing, but are actually confused and are actually watching SD content believing it is HD.
Qualcomm said this week that another of Nokia intellectual property counter suits in Europe, where Nokia has asked for a declaration in the Netherlands to say that Qualcomm’s patents are exhausted there, has been thrown out of court. Nokia claims that that Qualcomm’s European patents are already covered by a Texas Instruments Patent Portfolio Agreement entered into in 2000 and as it buys its chips from TI, that should be sufficient. The Netherlands Court concluded that Nokia’s complaint was too vague and gave Nokia three months to appeal the Court’s decision. Last month another court reached much the same conclusion for Germany. Nokia is trying to establish the principle that only one patent payment can be claimed for a technology in Europe, not one for the chip maker, and another for the user of the chip, the handset maker. However US courts have already established that multiple charges can be levied in the US.
UK IPTV supplier Tiscali TV, a subsidiary of Italian ISP Tiscali, said that subscribers numbers have fallen back to just 36,000 (it was around 45,000 when it bought it) after delays in getting the company’s national rollout. The service used to be called HomeChoice and was only available in parts of London and Hertfordshire and is now due to take in 800 of the largest unbundled BT exchanges. ARPU is around £40 ($88) a month per home, and now it has moved customers over to its own network, it can begin aggressively trying to sell the service. Tiscali has now signed up UK sports channels from Setanta sports.
US set top researcher IMS Research says that hybrid devices such as IP-enabled game consoles and DVD players and recorders with integrated digital TV receivers are beginning to make their mark on the DTV industry with 30.7 million IP enabled consoles plus 6 million devices such as digital media adapters, SlingCatcher, Apple TV, and Media Center PCs shipped in 2007. This will rise to over 200 million such devices by 2012. Services such as Joost and Xbox LIVE Marketplace, as well as content providers’ initiatives to deliver content directly to consumers will stimulate this. Advances in DRM and watermarking will be needed and there will be new relationships formed between CE suppliers and Internet companies, IMS says.
Dilithium said this week that UT Starcom has licensed its 3G-324M video telephony stack software and entered into an OEM deal. It will use the technology to bring video, such as streaming, video telephony and video ring tones, into the TD CDMA market, which means China.
The Orchard and the Digital Music Group said they have completed their previously announced merger. The company will begin trading on November 14 on Nasdaq with Orchard president and chief executive Greg Scholl in charge.
Microsoft says that the latest membership figures for Xbox Live, now five years old, is over 8 million across 26 countries and in nine languages. To celebrate the 5 years in existence Microsoft gave out free content for an entire 48 hours and gave long term members 500 free Microsoft Points. It says that a new system upgrade will happen on December 4th.
Norwegian conditional access supplier Conax said this week that Multivision, the only wireless multi-system operator in Bolivia, will use its CAS7 content security system for providing wireless digital cable service in the cities of La Paz, Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and Tarija. Conax said this was its first MMDS operator customer in the region.
Microsoft this week launched new re-designed Zune software, a new Zune Marketplace and Zune Social, an online music community. It also said that it has employed 18 well known artists to offer special Zune designs called Zune Originals. There are three new Zune models, the black Zune 80GB, with 3.2 inch screen for $250; the ultra-portable Zune 4GB at $150 and the Zune 8GB at $200, all ready for delivery now. The new Zunes feature a new touch-sensitive pad for navigation.
Yahoo China is appealing against a Chinese court decision that Alibaba, the parent company of Yahoo China, is guilty of copyright infringement. It is said to have offered deep links to sites offering unauthorized music, said Billboard magazine. The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in April ordered Yahoo China to pay just $27,000 in damages to record labels and remove the links from its service.
The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation has raided a number of internet piracy sites in Finland, arresting three people and seizing servers which it said contain ten terabytes of illegal files. NBI is now investigating suspected copyright infringements, for which the maximum penalty is two years in prison. The sites are accused of sharing movies, music, computer games and popular software packages.
Sony last week cut nearly half the price off its PlayStation 3 software development kit. The move is aimed to get more developers to develop for the PS3 videogame console. The SDK fell to $10,250 in the US and $11,250 in Europe.
A US judge this week granted Apple’s motion to dismiss the legal action into its stock options backdating, brought against CEO Steve Jobs and other executives at Apple. The judge will let the suing investors re-file amended complaints if they choose. Since the Apple stock price actually went up, not down, it was hard to conclude that any real harm was done by the actions, legal or not. Apple’s own its internal investigation found 6,428 misdated stock-option grants, but completely cleared Jobs of any wrongdoing.
Czech telco Volny, owned by Telekom Austria, will extended the reach of its Volny TV IPTV service to over half of the one million fixed-lines within the Czech Republic and has introduced a new special offer of 31 TV channels for 6 months free, in return for signing up.
Wind Telecomunicazioni will be the third operator to launch IPTV services in Italy in the next few weeks, competing with Fastweb and Telecom Italia’s Alice TV. It said it is in the final steps of completing content agreements and within a few weeks will begin offering quad play bundles of fixed voice, cell-phone services, Internet and TV to the company’s 1 million Infostrada unbundled customers. It has been working on this system for a while and in October last year said it would spend €80 million with Alcatel to complete an IP-based transformation of its network throughout Italy.
Motorola’s VC arm has taken equity in Australian social-networking site called Tilefile says iTWire, built especially to bridge the experience gap between the large screens of PCs and the small screens of mobile devices. It combines different types of content into a single integrated file called a Tilefile, wrapping up video, photos and audio in a content-neutral format.
SyncTV this week announced a private beta of its TV download service, which it says will provide home-theater quality TV shows on Windows
PCs, Macs and Linux PCs, and in the future it will also work on TVs and
portable players. SyncTV’s charges a small monthly fee for each subscribed
channel, or offers them on a pay per download basis.
MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) this week said that both Broadcom and Conexant had moved up to its board of directors from just being contributors previously. Broadcom and Conexant, plus co-founder Entropic, gives MoCA three board members which are likely to commit to the system silicon, driving prices down for components that use coaxial cable to send entertainment around a home.
Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman may find that the US cable operators have more friends that he realized, and 24 members of the House Commerce Committee have asked in an open letter for more information and criticized him, describing his moves as ‘misguided and harmful.’ Martin promised to reveal changes in cable regulation in detail later this year.
AT&T said this week it plans acquire Ingenio and use its Pay Per Call technology which would mean that AT&T’s Yellow pages adverts could charge based on how many time a business number is called, rather than a flat rate.
Nemertes Research said this week that consumer and corporate internet usage could outstrip network capacity worldwide, but in particular in the US, as early as 2010 and said that the financial investment needed to stop that happening is anywhere between $42 billion and $55 billion in the US alone, which it says is way more than service providers have planned.
NBC has acquired Quarterlife, a TV series produced directly for the internet, which was designed to be shown as 36 eight minute episodes on MySpace. NBC will broadcast it as a single 6 hour program and has bought the international distribution rights. Back in September ABC rejected Quarterlife which is what led to it being offered to MySpace, so the program has come full circle.