The UK VoD joint venture known as Project Kangaroo, pushed by all the major broadcasting organizations including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, will have to be at least delayed and may be derailed after the Office of Fair Trading, a local regulator had the service referred to it. The OFT is worried that all those impressive, but competing, video libraries might give the joint venture to much market power.
China Telecom says that it has 940,000 IPTV subscribers, for the service it launched with the Shanghai Media Group (SMG) which has been delivered to Shanghai, Jiangxu, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Shaanxi since 2005. China Telecom now has a tender out for over 500,000 set-tops for the service, mostly for HD. Meanwhile rival China Netcom has just 100,000 subscribers in Beijing, Harbin and Shenyang, but is building out rapidly
Italian IPTV software specialist Neptuny, says it is launching ContentWise 2.0, a content recommendation engine for IPTV, cable and web TV services which will be shown at September’s IBC show in Amsterdam. This system is used for up-selling and cross-selling TV services, and the new version includes showing consumers what other homes have chosen to watch right now.
A US company Rosum, has created a location based technology around GPS plus a TV signal using system triangulation, and has shown in the UK that it can work with a DVB-H signal. The trial was held in conjunction with National Grid Wireless, a provider of TV infrastructure there. The system worked in a multi-storey car park, where GPS systems are known to behave badly.
Three major Japanese telcos NTT, KDDI and Softbank BB have set up their own IPTV forum to unify standards for IPTV services in Japan. There already exist similar forums that span the US and Europe. Some 15 local suppliers including Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, Sharp and Hitachi, together with NHK and the major commercial broadcasters in Tokyo have also joined.
US cable operator Charter Communications says that it will drop its plan to monitor the internet usage of its customers with a view to finding out what interests each household had to make advertising more effective. The idea was just at the trial stage, but critics describe it as ‘wire tapping,’ and the system actually worked by sampling the internet packets that were delivered, even though it was supposed to be anonymously.
Hiro Media, an advertising supported download specialist, and Pando Networks a P2P software supplier have joined forces to create an off the shelf entertainment service which adds security to free video downloads.
The system will use HIRO’s Positive DRM, which won’t let you skip advertising, with Pando’s centrally managed P2P delivery service. Hiro already has customers for this in Israel, the UK, Australia and the US.
All the gaming web sites are suggesting that Microsoft is about to cut the price of its Xbox 360 by around $50 making the 20GB Pro version just $299 putting it $100 under the equivalent PS3. But analyst reckon that it won’t make the devices fly off the shelves and it will only be so long before Sony follows suit.
Researcher Multimedia Intelligence says that the market for in-flight broadband services will grow to $936 million by 2012. Much of the effort of running an airline these days must be looking for cost cuts to make up for the increase in fuel costs. Airlines are expected to invest in new services to derive additional revenue. New services are on the verge of launch later in 2008 and the market for in-flight broadband should generate as much as $6.6 million in its first year with two camps, air-to-ground and satellite-based.
This week France Telecom has abandoned its bid to acquire Scandinavia operator TeliaSonera in a $40 billion cash and share offer. The Swedish government, one of the main shareholders could no agree a price it seems.
South African media group Naspers has agree the sale of its Greek and Cypriot pay TV business it announced as it gave its results this week. It also said it was expecting something of a credit crunch to affect advertising revenues, but that pay-TV is usually secure in an economic downturn, even though more competition was entering South African markets. The DTH platform has grown subscriber by 13% up 246,000, to 2.5 million homes.
A US court last week Friday upheld the FCC authority to set rules regarding the ease with which new cable TV businesses can to gain local franchises. Local governments across the country had filed challenges to its rules as it tried to speed the approval process, cap fees paid, and ease build out requirements. A lower court said that the FCC did not have the pr to do this, but the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has now ruled that it does in fact have the power. The Court heard that Verizon had applied for TV 113 franchises by March 2005, but only 10 were granted inside one year.
Samsung has joined LG’s Zenith Electronics in a legal action against Polaroid and Westinghouse which they say are infringing their patents for the ATSC US digital TV standard. The case will now be added to one already filed in US Eastern District Court of Texas, and is in the US District Court of Delaware. The two Koreans just want Polaroid and Westinghouse to buy a license in order to build TVs, tuners, set-top boxes and digital video recorders.
US DRM vendor Widevine said that it has a contract to secure the Tv services of Lithuanian multichannel TV provider Viginta, which offers TV over DTT, cable and IPTV and says that this is the first time a downloadable conditional access and DRM has been implemented in a one way DTT network, drastically reducing the time to market.
Blockbuster said this week that it would withdraw its $1 billion bid to buy consumer electronics retailer Circuit City in the US, saying that market conditions and the completion of due diligence suggests the deal is not in the interest of Blockbuster’s shareholders .