Researcher BIA Financial Network, says that broadcast television in the US alone could add an extra $2 billion in annual revenue by 2012 if it delivers content to mobile and handheld devices. But it needs a clear industry standard to deploy. BIA points to the emergence of ATSC’s M/H standard which it says needs to be rushed to be ready for February 2009. The $2 billion is a combination of fees and advertising revenues it says, though we reckon it will mostly be advertising in free to air services.
Sweden’s Dreampark, a native European IPTV middleware supplier says that it has installed its Dreamgallery at Spanish triple-play operator, TV Almansa in the cooperation with Spanish system integrator bcSitemas. TV Almansa is a local cable operator which wants to use IPTV over its cable.
India’s regulator TRAI recommended allowing broadcasters to transmit channels through IPTV networks, such as major Telcos, Bharti and Reliance and this has now been endorsed by the Department of Telecom. It has yet to allow TV programs to be delivered by ISPS but is still considering this.
Apple has already introduced new models for the iPhone as well as additional iPod touch devices, doubling memory maximums to 16GB on the iPhone for $499, and the iPod touch now comes in a 32GB model for $499, 16GB model for $399 and the 8GB model for $299. ‘For some users, there’s never enough memory,’ the company said.
US media chip maker Zoran said that it is now demoing its new COACH 11 digital camera processor and will have it on show at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) trade show in Las Vegas. This version offers hardware-based Face Tracking, detecting up to 10 faces at a time so that the photographer can focus and track a subject anywhere within a frame. It also offers HD quality video recording, and has a Blur correction technology which detects camera motion via an external gyro and corrects the image in the camera. Zoran is targeting the 130 million digital cameras which will be sold during 2008.
In the UK the industry lobby group the Digital Television Group (DTG) said that regulator Ofcom proposals for a single HDTV DVB-T2 multiplex were welcomed, but did not go far enough, criticizing it for relying on new codecs, the on time arrival of DVB-T2 technology and its performance to spec. It says that Ofcom should be looking at moving to a single frequency network which is more spectrally efficient. In the end it is being criticized as a UK only solution. What is really needed says DTG, is a national HDTV strategy taking in TV platforms: cable, IPTV, satellite and terrestrial and grandfathering a dedicated HD multiplex to the public service broadcasting channels BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5, and calls for more spectrum to be released on a temporary basis. Can’t say we agree.
Israeli encoder manufacturer Optibase said this week that a major TV network in the United States selected Optibase advanced IPTV solution for its in-house video delivery system. It does not name the company but will supply an Optibase Telco-grade Media Gateway (MGW) 5100 streaming platform, which will offer a display of 16 live video channels simultaneously on PC’s and Mac’s.
Handheld video player maker ZVUE said this week its has signed distribution agreements with five new professional content creators and publishers featuring 17 channels of entertainment, including Comedy Time, FuTurXTV, GoTV, Link TV and Mobi Jokes.
We’re not sure just how much good it is going to do the company, but CyberLink this week said that one of its patents has been included in the HD DVD patent license which is considered essential to the HD DVD standard. The CyberLink’s patent relates to the specifications for interactive content over a network for prerecorded HD-DVD Disks.
Motorola’s new CEO Greg Brown says what about selling off the troubled handset division. What’s wrong is that it’s a bit like removing a body from a nose or a foot, hoping the nose or the foot would survive on their own. This will likely to lead to a complete break-up of the company, into its four core markets and suggests that problems in the handset business run even deeper than the disastrous performance of the past year has suggested. Nokia has now hit a global market share of 40%, while Motorola is half that. Handsets are more than 50% of Motorola revenues, but fixing it will cost as much as $2billion and with a price tag of over $7.5 billion only Far East manufacturers or a Chinese ODM come to mind as potential bidders. Brown has more hope of a partnership than a sale.
Clearwire’s CEO, Ben Wolff hinted during the company’s investor conference that Sprint and Clearwire are working on a unified architecture and that a roaming deal and perhaps a full network build co-operation may be on the cards after all. Clearwire has recently said it will slow its own build schedules from a prior estimate of 30.5 million POPs to about 6 million. Clearwire European operations are also scaling back and looking for partners. Clearwire ended 2007 with 394,000 subscribers and $151 million in revenue, but did not report its net loss.
Meanwhile Sprint has said it has no plans to sell off its Nextel Direct Connect iDEN network and new CEO Dan Hesse says that Sprint will focus on enhancing it in 2008 with extra features such as ‘Push to X’, an enhancement of the Push to Talk feature that made Nextel famous, supporting many forms of messaging including video.
The most interesting twist in a so-far humdrum 700MHz spectrum auction in the US came on Monday, when bidding in the hotly watched block C took an unusual turn. The maximum bid of $4.7bn for licenses in all 50 states had stood unchanged for several rounds, and had already triggered the open access provision. Now a new bidder, hotly tipped to be AT&T, has selectively bid up a number of regions so that the bids for the regions now exceed the $4.7bn high bid for the national block. It is widely thought that the national bid was Verizon’s and that Google, despite all the furore about its possible spectrum ambitions, has either dropped out or will do shortly, say our friends at financial research house JRPG through analyst Jamie Townsend.
Texas Instruments showed of a 45 nanometer process at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week, for making 3.5G baseband and multimedia processors. It says it will be exceptionally low power using its new SmartReflex 2 power and performance management technologies, which is says realize a 55% performance increase and a 63% power reduction compared to the 65nm process. TI’s first 45nm wireless digital design integrates hundreds of millions of transistors in a 12mm x 12mm package.
XM Satellite Radio and Sony BMG this week said that they have resolved the legal action brought by SONY BMG over its Pioneer Inno, portable satellite radio which could store radio programs. The companies did not disclose terms of the deal. SONY BMG is the third music company to resolve its dispute with XM and similar deals have been cut by Universal Music and Warner Music. The case was brought in May 2006 and that should only leave EMI among the majors to settle.
Quotes involving a Snowball’s chance and hell come to mind over the case where Nokia is being sued for just under $18 billion in the district court of Mannheim in Germany by Munich-based IP-Com. This claim is made on 160 cellular patents it bought from Germany’s Bosch in 2007. They fall into about eight families of patents and the next hearing is scheduled for April.
Nokia denies all allegations and said that it believes the patents are both invalid and have not been infringed.
NDS and Quantum, which makes dedicated mobile TV players popular in Italy, said they have integrated the NDS VideoGuard Mobile content protection system for DVB-H on Quantum’s Pocket TV. The existing cellular devices in Italy all use NDS’ rival Nagravision’s DRM.
Israeli security company Discretix says it is working with multimedia application provider VisualOn, and mobile TV middleware developer Axel Technologies to provide a pre-integrated Mobile TV system for handset OEMs based on DVB-H supporting both the OMA BCAST Smartcard and DRM Security Profiles.