US researcher Parks Associates predicts that HD radio and satellite radio combined will reach around 70 Million subscribers between them by 2012. Parks reckons that satellite radio subs will make up 20.5 million by the end of 2008 and 39 million by 2012, while HD radio will rise from 4.2 million in 2008 to 30 million by 2012.
Harmonic said this week that the Rhozet Carbon Coder video transcoding system that it acquired last August, has been selected by Pharos, to integrate with its Mediator v3 media management system and that both products are to be installed at Viasat, the Scandinavian satellite TV distributor owned by the Modern Times Group. The Carbon Coder encodes and stores lots of different resolutions of any given video so that it can be served over the internet. Viasat TV channels reach 100 million people across 24 European countries.
Facebook is reported as gaining a European partner as well as another huge slice of money (the amount was not reported, but likely at the $100s millions level) from German Internet entrepreneurs the Samwer Brothers. The brothers reported the deal through Reuters, but wouldn’t give details except to say that they were going to support the expansion of Facebook into Europe. The two have been involved with a local auction site sold to eBay and with the ringtone firm Jamba.
Boeing has been awarded a contract to build a commercial satellite for ProtoStar, on a 601 HP-model spacecraft, to deliver direct-to-home satellite TV as well as two way broadband access throughout Asia. The value of the deal was not disclosed but a satellite of that type will come to significantly more than $100 million. The satellite will go up in 2009 and reach billions of people in India, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines and Southeast Asia, the company said.
The Mobile Marketing Association has completed a Mobile Attitude and Usage Study across 1,535 participants in the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain, finding that Italian and Spanish consumers are most interested in mobile marketing and that they expect this to rely initially on two way SMS texting services, interactive voting, and opting into advertisements. 18 ‘ 34 year olds have the highest rate of participation in mobile marketing efforts and are also interested in mobile coupons, status alerts about accounts and purchases and special sales.
Smart card vendor Gemalto and Swiss conditional access company Nagravision say they have demonstrated an end to end OMA BCAST Smartcard system where they successfully demonstrated interoperability between head-end equipment and a Mobile TV card and compliance tested it on an OMA field test. The two are now launching the combined product. The OMA BCAST standard is an open standard for DRM when working with broadcast applications, which do not have two way interaction.
The State of California is not happy to just give up on its one state campaign to take violent video games off retail shelves, and has filed with the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to challenge the decision last Summer of a District Court Judge, who struck down a state law aimed at restricting which video games could be sold to minors. The District court cited the First Amendment in the case, saying that to block the games was a breach of freedom of speech.
Variety magazine’s daily web site reckons that the last two remaining studios which are backing the HD DVD format in the US are about to change their position, effectively ending the high definition format war overnight. Variety said that Universal Studio’s commitment was in the form of an exclusivity deal, which has now has ended while Paramount Pictures has a contract clause that lets it follow the change in strategy announced last week by Warner Brothers. Universal has made some statements about not being ready to make such a move, but this may be due to existing promotions that would be otherwise wasted.
We have already reported that Hungarian broadcaster Antenna Hungaria was starting a mobile TV technical trial using DVB-H technology back in April last year. Now it has teamed up with T-Mobile, Vodafone and Nokia, for a commercial trial using a Nokia Siemens Networks platform and Nokia handsets. This will run until the end of January 2008. Spectrum for mobile TV in Hungary should be allocated during the first half of 2008. Antenna Hung’ria is the mobile arm of Magyar Telekom, majority owned by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom,
French President Nicolas Sarkozy says his government will look into dropping advertisements from its public sector television and radio channels, rather like the UK. The French public channels are financed by a license fee of €116 a year ($172), which brings in around €2.7 billion ($4 billion) with advertising bringing in an extra €800 million ($1.2 billion). Sarkozy’s position is that a public broadcaster has to be independent of commercial pressure. The issue was raised when a story broke that channel France 3 had made cuts in a documentary to appease an advertiser. The idea is that the shortfall should be made up by taxing the advertising on other commercial channels. Given how close to the breadline broadcast TV is, that’s unlikely to hold water for very long.
The chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin, confirmed last week that there will be an investigation into complaints that Comcast is actively interfering with internet traffic, specifically blocking file sharing. The issue was brewing throughout 2007, as Comcast and other operators thought it was okay to block file sharing because it is mostly piracy, but as there are now legal forms of file sharing, using P2P systems, it may need to differentiate intelligently between services. Comcast says simply that it doesn’t block file sharing.
Japanese gaming sales hit a record in 2007 based primarily on the unexpected success of the Nintendo Wii console and its DS handheld plus their games. Web site and magazine group Enterbrain said that hardware and software gaming sales in Japan totaled $6.3 billion in 2007, up 10% from the previous year with the DS handheld device selling 7.1 million units and the Wii selling 3.6 million units. Sony sold 3 million PlayStation Portables and 1.2 million PlayStation 3 machines while only 257,800 Microsoft Xbox360 devices were sold in Japan last year.
Sony BMG has agreed to sell its music catalogue without DRM protection on Amazon. That makes all four major labels offering music on Amazon MP3 without DRM. With Warner Music Group agreeing a deal last month.
Microsoft appears to be in deep water with the European Commission over anti-trust again, with two new proceedings begun against it, one over tying browsers to sales of Microsoft Windows, brought by browser company Opera, which also says that Internet Explorer does things in non-standard ways, and another over Microsoft’s refusal to disclose .Net interoperability information. Both are at an early stage, but complaints come from the European Committee for Interoperable Standards, whose members include Adobe, IBM, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat and Sun.
UK web video services firm Narrowstep has reported losses up to $2.8 million for the last three months, and a nine-month loss of around $11 million. Narrowstep, which still has around £6 million in the bank. is a broadband TV company, a bit like the US firm Brightcove, whose clients include Virgin Media, Telefonica and KPN. The company says that its development costs are now behind it and it has a strong pipeline of deals and increased revenues by 49% over this quarter last year to around $3.5 million. It has also just integrated its offering with Microsoft Silverlight.
Sony in Japan has followed suit with other countries and will discontinue its 20GB and 60GB PlayStation 3 after a final shipment in January, according to gaming web site gamesindustry.biz, so that it can concentrate on the 40GB model, which is now far cheaper to make. Sony said that it expects the PlayStation business to go back to being profitable in the next fiscal year, as it enjoys reduced manufacturing costs.
US DRM company SecureMedia said that it has won the contract to protect the IPTV content in the Netherlands Antilles Island of Bonaire, with its Encryptonite ONE system for monopoly telecom operator Telefonia Bonairiano. The system is called mitv, and runs across ADSL 2+
US encoder specialist Harmonic said this week that Trinity Broadcasting Network, a broadcaster serving more than 12,500 television and cable affiliates worldwide via 54 satellites, has deployed Harmonic’s DiviCom MV 500 high definition (HD) and MV 100 standard definition (SD) encoders, along with its and DiviTrack statistical multiplexing system.