UK set top maker Pace has another major contact this week, once again with a News Corporation business, in Foxtel Australia, which has launched the first Australian pay TV service with HD, and which offers two Pace DVRs, one to work with satellite and one with cable. Both devices come with 320GB hard drives and quad-tuners, two for recording programs, one for live TV and one shared between the EPG and delivering push-VOD content.
Research group GfK reveals that 310,000 DTT decoders were sold in Italy during May, bringing sales this year to 1.4 million and the total installed to 8.6 million. The great bulk of these were integrated within other devices, such as TVs. There are now 5.9 million DTT households in Italy.
Researcher ABI has been counting up UltraWideBand chip sales and reckons that WiQuest is the leader, followed by Alereon and then Pulse~Link. ABI doesn’t do the calculation purely on chip shipments, but also on, ‘implementation, innovation and industry partners.’ Others in the top ten are Wisair, Realtek, Sigma Designs, TZero, WiLinx, Staccato Communications and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Pulse~link sells its own technology, while we think all of the others sell implementations of the WiMedia Alliance defined Multiband OFDM system.
Another report from rival In-Stat says that just under 100,000 Wireless USB devices shipped in 2007, which will grow to 190 million by 2012. Given the acceptance rate to date, we can’t believe that latter figure, not while the WiMedia systems barely work.
Nokia Siemens Networks has made a strategic decision to play down Fiber to the Home deployments on the basis that mass market roll out is unlikely in the short term. This means that it will focus on DSL and next generation optical access technology and limit its investment in existing Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON). NSN says it will develop the next generation of technologies after GPON which it thinks will take a leading role in future FTTH markets. Nokia Siemens Networks will continue its fixed access investment in DSL by introducing new products addressing fiber to the curb.
Infineon Technologies has announced new ADSL2+ and VDSL2 chips for customer premise equipment which are optimized for IPTV by using new features such as predictive error decoding (Erasure Decoding) and Gamma Layer Retransmission. It says it has the first DSL architecture to include Erasure Decoding and Gamma Layer Retransmission concurrently on a single chip. Erasure Decoding improves impulse noise immunity, so better error protection. Gamma Layer Retransmission allows for intelligent traffic shaping and discrimination of content ‘ code for blocking unwanted traffic.
Google has bought Russian company ZAO Begun from Rambler Media, a leading Russian contextual advertising service, paying $140 million. This will give Russian advertisers access to a broader network of sites to carry advertising, and Google says it will bring users more relevant advertising.
Breakthrough codec designer Broadcast International will use some specialist fast I/O hardware and IBM’s BladeCenter based on the same Cell chip which drives the Sony PS3, to show off its CodecSys encoding system at the IPTV North America show in Chicago this week. NextIO a specialist in virtualized I/O, will supply the hardware that will get HD video in and out of the blades as fast as the Cell can encode it. Broadcast International has already got HD video encoding down to a 3 Mbps stream.
Tiny $99 handheld PMP maker ZVUE, which last year changed direction with the purchase of eBaumsWorld.com web site, has renegotiated with its founder Eric Bauman for staged buy-out payments, which have now been extended until 2012. ZVUE uses the user generated video site to sell its cheap handheld video players. The company has also raised $1 million in new financing from its current CTO.
Billing player Comverse has cut a deal with IBM to jointly go after telecommunications service providers in a technology and services agreement. Comverse and IBM will offer systems based on IBM’s software products and service delivery platforms with Comverse’s billing and active customer management systems.
The next round in the intense legal battle between Nokia and Qualcomm commences this week, with a hearing in the Delaware Court of Chancery starting today. A decision by this court, which specializes in business disputes, will certainly not result in a final outcome for the two companies’ bitter patent and licensing disputes, which have raged since their cross-licensing deal expired 15 months ago. But it could provide a significant indicator of how the tide is flowing and put pressure on the losing side to make a settlement ‘ a settlement that could actually benefit both companies, by opening the road for Nokia to use Qualcomm’s more advanced chips in future. And given the power of both players in their respective markets, any decision in Delaware will have knock-on implications for the structure of the handset business, and for future IPR policies as the mobile world shifts towards open source.
Minerva Networks, a leading IPTV middleware player this week added three new systems integrators in the Middle East to support the growing number of installations in the region of its iTVManager platform. ACT in Egypt, Bond Communications in the United Arab Emirates, and Mannai in Qatar have completed iTVManager training and are integrating several IPTV projects in their respective countries.
XM Satellite Radio announced that its second quarter revenue rose to $318 million, up 15% over last year taking the company to 9.65 million, and in the processed narrowed its quarterly loss from 176 million a year ago to $120 million now. The company said it had experienced a 39% increase in the number of additions through automotive OEM channels. Subscriber acquisition costs went down to $65 from $75 a year ago, which amounts to a change in direction.
IPTV conditional access specialist Verimatrix said this week that it has completed a Series C round of funding led by Goldman Sachs to fund aggressive business expansion and accelerate deployment of Verimatrix’s 3-Dimensional Content Security. All of the company’s Series B investors, participated in the round and the company said that it now has more than 150 IPTV customers in 32 countries, supporting over 5 million screens. But it never said how much it had raised.
BSkyB is preparing the launch of its own online music store says the Times newspaper in London, It has already signed a deal with Universal Music Group to make its catalog available for streaming and downloading and hopes to arrange similar deals with the remaining major record labels. There are no release details of the service yet but it will be a subscription service costing around £10 ($20) a month.
The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland has awarded three national Digital Terrestrial TV multiplexes to a consortium led by the Swedish state-owned pay-TV company Boxer, working with the Irish commercial radio group Communicorp. The multiplexes are due to start broadcasting in 2009 with licenses running for 12 years.
TiVo and the online retailer Amazon are going to allow TiVo customers to buy products seen on TV programs by using their remote control and without interruption to the program they are watching. Viewers will select products from a list of options on screen and place an order directly with Amazon.