UK set top maker Pace said that it has signed a significant new contract for the US cable market which will be big enough to affect its current financial reporting year. It says that contract is for a low cost digital to analog converter, like those which are being subsidized for $40 apiece by the US government to accelerate the transition to all digital networks. The contract runs over three years but it hasn’t said who it is with.
There is something which every subscriber business owner always keeps up his sleeve, which is that you can freeze expensive marketing efforts and accept the number of subscriptions you already have, instead of chasing subscriber growth and save cash at a flat subscriber rate. That’s exactly the point that TiVo has reached. It has upped its first quarter net income four fold to $3.6 million on revenues of $54.9 million. However that revenue is already down from $58.1 million for the same period last year and he company is down to 3.8 million subscribers from 4.3 million, so the question that analysts are now asking about TiVo is ‘Where is new business going to come from?’ The answer of course is technology licensing, but this hinges on the final, final outcome of TiVo versus Dish and its work on new advertising formats with the cable operators an DirecTV.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has its latest report out where it concludes that most US consumers use the internet to research purchases more than make them, and continue to purchase things like music in much the same way as they always have. This is probably very true at the individual level, but the few who go the whole hog and use the internet for more and more purchasing, are affecting the music and other markets far more.
US cable TV prices have risen by 77% since 1996, at roughly double the rate of inflation, says a report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics this month with cable customers paying around $60 a month, and watching only 11 or 12 channels out of the average of 118 available to them. This only goes to show that except for TelcoTV services, and of course DTH satellite, TV which costs almost as much, there is nothing yet out there on the internet, to match the safety of buying cable. But at some stage, there will be and the backlash of constantly rising prices may hit hard and suddenly.
The FCC is asking for opinions on whether or not it should put a 25 MHz band of spectrum in the 2.1 GHz area up for auction. It is floating the idea that it would make one condition the idea of offering a free broadband service with a strict buildout schedule. The only problem will be exactly how that company makes its money ‘ advertising and Google appear to be one obvious answer and tiered service quality will be the other.
TiVo said this week it that its subscribers will soon be able to download movies from Disney Studios to their broadband connected TiVo DVRs. The deal will offer the movies for rental, based on an existing agreement with Disney and CinemaNow using the same old tired Disney model of allowing a 24-hour viewing period once customers have begun to watch the film. Doesn’t Disney understand, that as long as the film is encrypted, the customer should be able to keep it on their DVR for as long as they like, because eventually they will have to make room on he device for other programs they haven’t watched. All this encourages is copying it off onto DVD for keeping permanently. TiVo now offers 30,000 titles through Amazon Unbox, Music Choice and 50 other content providers including YouTube.
BitTorrent and placeshifting software house Orb Networks, have cut a deal whereby BitTorrent downloads can then be bounced on to any other remote device, all from the same integrated piece of software. The BitTorrent client application and the Orb PC application make placeshifting automatic for anything downloaded.
US web video enabler Brightcove said this week it has a majority owned Japanese subsidiary called Brightcove KK, backed with $4.9 million of new investment from Brightcove itself and four Japanese partners Dentsu, J-Stream, Transcosmos and Cyber Communications, most of which will be local sales agents for the service. Brightcove offers tools and a partnership with a Content Delivery Network to make it easy to set up streaming video over the internet.
It’s laugh out loud funny that the Vodafone Germany CEO has come out and said that Mobile TV in Germany will never take off with DVB-H, because it is just sour grapes at the Vodafone, T-Mobile consortium not being given the contract to deploy it. Local CEO Fritz Joussen, told the press that a model with a subscription based offering which needs to pay for a dedicated network, is ‘very difficult’. Still it’s not so difficult that 3 Italia couldn’t manage to get 1 million customers on the service in Italy, while Vodafone completely screwed up in that country. Vodafone now has DVB-T tuners in its handsets in Germany, which it says gives completely free TV. It will also use up your battery in 30 minutes and give you a lousy signal with no in-building penetration, no EPG and almost no future revenue possibilities. How sour are those grapes?
YouTube has been telling anyone that asks it this week that the $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit from Viacom is threatening the internet etc’ and webzines on a slow day looking for a headline, have taken up the theme. YouTube owner Google says it obeys take down notices, under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and Viacom says there are millions of people illegally watching its content on YouTube. If this goes to the Surpreme Court YouTube will fail, as did the infringing P2P players. What happened to the software that Google has written to stop this from happening? It looks like it just doesn’t work ‘ an impression that we got right from the start when it ignored the available commercial offerings and said it had to write its own. This has to be resolved or it will seriously damage Google.
Is there really a market for mobile only broadband? Well this week a UK company called Billion (the amount it hopes to make we presume) has come to market with a router for the cellular broadband signal that is cropping up more and more frequently attached to laptops so that it can be shared around the home. We shouldn’t imagine that Cellcos will be too delighted about the load this will place on their networks, for no extra revenue (most now offer flat rate service up to key data limits). Watch out for a research service which counts totally fixed line free homes.
Israel’s largest pay TV service provider, Hot Telecommunications has turned to Harmonic to supply all of its encoding needs for IP-based digital video. This will allow Hot to offer HD over cable. The company offers 150 channels plus a voice and data triple play and has 1 million subscribers. Not bad in a country that only has 6.4 million people.
Greek satellite operator, Hellas Sat, says it is ready to launch a new HD platform and it will use conditional access using Conax CAS7. It claims it is the first HD service in Greece.
The New York Times reports that Apple has filed a patent for a technology which would enable Apple devices to be charged by solar energy. Typical of Apple a similar patent is understood to have been applied for other suppliers to the mobile handset industry, but Apple of course has the advantage of offering such a big screen, since its screen is touch sensitive. We can’t imagine that this patent will stick, as its patent for controlling an MP3 player didn’t, but Apple may bring the idea to market sooner than anyone else, despite the fact that promises have already been made by some suppliers.
Austria will launch its DVB-H Mobile TV service through cellular operator ONE on June 6 in a few days time. It is already shipping devices in preparation for the take off, which is expected to hinge on requirements to watch the European Soccer cup finals on the go. There will be 14 channels and five radio stations and the first signals will be picked up in Vienna, Innsbruck, Salzburg and Klagenfurt, the hosting cities for the soccer games which it is sharing the hosting of with Switzerland. The network will then be expanded to the remaining state capitals before the end of this year.
Silicon Motion Technology says that its FC2750 DVB-H mobile TV tuner (not demodulator as well, just the tuner note) has been chosen to go in the Samsung SGH-P960 DVB-H slider phone aimed at Europe. The handset will support both DVB-CBMS and OMA-BCAST, features a 2.6″ QVGA screen and has a time-shift function to pause live TV.
AT&T this week said it was one month away from deploying HSUPA across its entire 3G network. This will make AT&T the only US carrier to have fully deployed HSPA technology it says. Well given that Verizon is on CDMA and will therefore deploy (is deploying) EV-DO, that’s hardly surprising. AT&T says that customers will get uplink speeds as fast as 500 and 800 Kbps and downloads up to 1.4 Mbps, which is slow compared to most European and Japanese networks but still fast enough to give you something approaching wi-fi speeds for your laptop, throughout the US.
The CEO of Unity Media in Germany was caught by Advanced TV News saying that the German cable industry will need to consolidate. Not too surprising for a CEO that has merged at least three cable companies (might be more) into one seriously aggressive one. Only Kabel Deutschland is bigger. He warned that consolidation was necessary because of quadruple plays coming out of companies like Vodafone, which in Germany is true. But meanwhile what about the satellite consolidation. German DTH supplier Premiere has appointed two investment banks to help it consider an imminent takeover expected from News Corp.