The CEO of Virgin Media, whose bid for UK broadcaster ITV triggered the purchase of a 17.9% stake in the company by BSKyB, said this week that it did not intend to renew its $9 billion bid for ITV, now that the competition authority has forced Sky to sell most of its shareholding. Sky said it will lose some £343 million (around $700 million) on the enforced sale.
A system developed by Israel’s Aerophone will allow normal mobile phones to be used in aircraft, and will do the installation and run the equipment free of charge for airlines. Calls will cost $1.60 a minute and come on the normal phone bill and are placed using a picocell in the plane and a Ku band satellite connection for the rest of the journey. Some airlines have already tried and closed such a service, certainly for transcontinental flights, and in many countries it is illegal to turn a handset on in an aircraft, primarily because it turns the radio up to full power if it can’t reach a base station, and this blocks ground calls.
Samsung was talking about a TV capable of 3D content, many times more dense than existing high definition, at the International Solid State Circuits Conference last month. Such a device would need a screen of at least 80 inches and will have 4096 x 2160 resolution and operate at 60 frames a seconds. The data rate to feed such a monster, even at just 24 frames a second would be 300Mbps using JPEG2000. Expect it around 2015 the company said when it can build a processor to handle it and when networks are fast enough.
Vodafone, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Orange and 3 Group ‘ most of the European cellular heavyweights, have formed a working group to define common metrics and measurement processes for mobile advertising as part of the GSMA’s Mobile Advertising Program. Back in June the GSMA and the Mobile Marketing Association agreed to cooperate on developing the same mobile advertising standards after the GSMA formed its own committee to look into this very thing. The new working group will conduct a feasibility study, focusing initially on the UK, to explore the aggregation of mobile advertising audit information to the media and advertising communities.
French mobile software house Streamezzo used the Barcelona Mobile World Congress to announce that its universal rich media platform the Streamezzo Workbench SDK is on general availability. The SDK is about porting once to a handset and using a Streamezzo abstraction layer to deliver rich media applications to 250 different mobile phones and all the major operating systems and platforms, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, Brew, Java, Linux and Android.
AT&T has now got final approval to buy two 8 MHz slices of the 700 Mhz spectrum in the private deal with Aloha, announced in October, which covers around 196 million potential wireless subscribers. No-one outside of AT&T knows what the spectrum will be used for, but it said it will support mobile access including video.
The UK’s Cranfield School of Management Research has conducted a study for ISP Pipex which reveals that many (46%) small and medium enterprises feel that the internet has made their life more complicated, with a third saying that it is far harder to protect confidential information and 62% saying that the Internet has increased competition from foreign markets. Having said that 97% have email, 94% broadband and 84% have a website.
Netherlands based conditional access company Irdeto said this week it has landed a deal with the Jilin Provincial Network in China for two million smart cards over the next two and a half years for its digital migration project. Jilin Provincial Network has three million registered subscribers in its analog cable TV network and will move 600,000 to digital shortly. Jilin is an existing customer of Irdeto’s CA system.
The GSMA was never going to be happy with European Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding’s recent comments that roaming charges have come down, but not enough, and that she was prepared to get involved once more in regulation. Many of the roaming charges have simply been moved off voice onto SMS and data downloading. The GSMA responded at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, saying that there has been a fall of as much as 10% between the last two quarters, and that average prices have fallen further and it called for the Commission to stay out of price regulation.
Vodafone said this week it would reduce prices by up to 45% on its monthly data-roaming tariff. But Reding is unlikely to be moved and is likely to seek a mandate to accelerate roaming charges which are still often many times the price of a call.
The GSMA in Barcelona this week said that any operator that builds a network using LTE technology can now join the association. Previously an operator had to have either a GSM or 3G network, and the GSMA is 700 members strong, but now companies like Verizon in the US would be a candidate, once it shifts to LTE from CDMA.
Sweden’s Dreampark, the IPTV middleware supplier, said this week that it is branching out into hospitality IPTV, in a deal with Hoist Hospitality Group, which supplies entertainment systems to hotels. Dreampark will create a customized version its Dreamgallery IPTV middleware so that Hoist customers can deliver HD video to their guests. Hoist will distribute and sell the system to its customers in Scandinavia and Russia, potentially placing it in more than 15,000 rooms.
On2 Technologies this week has merged its own codecs and those from its recent Finnish acquisition Hantro, which specializes in H.264 codecs, and together into a handset based hardware decoder. The Hantro 8190 supports H.263, H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, Sorenson Spark and VP6 codecs, including the hugely popular Adobe Flash video format and will mean that handsets can view web video in QuickTime, DivX and multiple generations of Adobe Flash video, used by websites like YouTube and Facebook. The design is capable of decoding H.264 format high profile, 1080p resolution video at 30fps using a clock frequency under 165MHz.
Uruguay will have its own DVB-H mobile TV trial over the next two months through Ancel, the mobile part of telco Antel. Five free channels will be broadcast in the resort area of Punta del Este, on the country’s southeast coast. Uruguay said last year it will adopt the DVB-T standard for digital terrestrial TV.
US encoder specialist Envivio said this week it has cut a deal with RealNetworks whereby it can resell the Envivio 4Caster Mobile Series hardware encoding platform. The idea is that RealNetworks can offer a carrier grade mobile streaming system which includes the encoders. Envivio and RealNetworks have a longstanding relationship in mobile streaming and work together at 100 operators including Vodafone, AT&T, TIM and Telefonica.