You may remember that British Telecom wrote the Go Messenger product for the Sony PlayStation Portable allowing PSP users to make video and VoIP calls when connected to wi-fi. BT now says that it has been launched in 103 countries and it had 211,000 registered customers by the end of March, just ten weeks after the launch.
The Motion Picture Association of America has plans to do its own search engine for video which will only show users where movies can be bought from legal outlets. It will also offer cinema ticket sales and online DVD rental. So what are they bringing to the party that blinkx, Google and AOL haven’t already invented? Nothing, we would expect.
Vonage says that it has arranged terms for $215 million of debt through French venture investor Silver Point Finance, which will put in $125 million of its own money, and has already lined up a further $60 million from other sources. The full amount will be raised by the third quarter, the company said, and the money plus cash Vonage already holds, will be used to repurchase existing convertible notes due December 16, 2008 for $253 million. Vonage was relieved of much of its cash though three successful patent infringement actions brought against it by major US telcos last year.
UK set top maker Pace completed the half year shipping 2.8 million set-top boxes compared to 1.8 million in the second half of 2007, the immediate past trading period. During the 6 months it landed ten HD DVR deals including Foxtel, UPC, Viasat, Sky Italia, Sky New Zealand and US cable and completed its acquisition of the Philips set top business. Revenues are up 22% to £231 million ($458 million). Profits were up 6% to £11.2 million ($22 million).
Scandinavian telecoms giant TeliaSonera grew revenues 5.7% to SEK 25,274 million ($4.15 billion) with around 3.2% organic growth and the rest from acquisitions. Broadband subs rose 236,000 to 2.4 million, fixed voice went down 322,000 to 6 million. TV subscriptions rose to 816,000, of which nearly 430,000 were IPTV subscriptions.
Wi-fi pioneer Ruckus Wireless says that Belgian incumbent telco Belgacom is among the first customers to adopt its new Ruckus 802.11n based MediaFlex 7000 for wirelessly shipping HD IPTV services around a home. It announced this as it made the MediaFlex 7000 series generally available for the first time. Clearly it remains far stronger outside of its native US than within it and has yet to get a major win at home. Ruckus says that Belgacom tested the MediaFlex 7000 over a 20 hour test of multiple non-stop HD IPTV streams at 20Mbps, to six different locations throughout a simulated home environment, with injected interference, and it passed without dropping a single packet. Previous products could not handle HD and it has been working on this product as a route back into US sales.
Clear Channel said this week that shareholders have approved the new merger agreement from a group led by Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners, with 97% of shares voted in favor of the transaction. The private equity buyout should now complete on July 30. The original deal had its debt terms changed in May after being agreed in February with the new deal valuing it at $17.9 billion. Clear Channel owns a huge outdoor advertising business and is the largest holder of US radio stations.
Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony’s PlayStation operations, told the video game industry at E3 last week that Sony expects to sell 150 million PS3s in a total of 9 years. The PlayStation sold 102 million, PlayStation 2 reached 140 million and Hirai is planning to beat that with the PS3. The price of course will have to come down a lot more before that will be a realistic target. At the end of Sony’s fiscal year in March, 12.85 million PS3 had been sold, and the company is forecasting sales of 10 million in its current fiscal year.
The FCC in the US has ruled that Comcast is in violation of federal policy in deliberately slowing down internet traffic on its network, to prevent file-sharing services from working at full speed and it must stop the activity. Comcast said its network had been overburdened by a few heavy users of services such as BitTorrent and is expected to mount a legal challenge to the FCC decision.
It’s fairly clear from reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs is not well, and investors are worried that he may have had a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer which has long been in remission. Few people have been prepared to go on the record about it, except to say that it’s a private matter. Jobs is known to have a strong, autocratic management style and it’s thought that if the company had to do without him, it would leave Apple weaker. One anonymous speaker came out and said that Job’s health issues, while complex, are not life threatening. But investors are said to remain worried.
Norway’s Telenor telco has selected the Thomson SmartVision software which drives France Telecom’s IPTV service for its own IPTV platform to launch in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. This will include video-on-demand servers, set-top DVRs but use Telenor’s in-house Conax conditional access system.
German newspapers are saying that Liberty Global has its eyes on acquiring UnityMedia, which has acquired 3 of the 4 cable operators previously owned by Deutsche Telekom there, except for Kabel Deutschland. Liberty once bid for the same properties back in 2002 but was prevented by the German cartel office. UnityMedia has 4.7 million cable, with around 925,000 of them digital.
Sony has decided to untether its latest e-book reader from its own online bookstore. This is in keeping with a new Sony approach to try to keep its devices open rather that operate a lock-in like Apple and its iTunes service.
Sony will offer a downloadable upgrade which will allow it to show books encoded in other formats used by other large publishers. The device is the only real credible alternative to Amazon’s Kindle, but costs $300, almost as much as the Kindle, but lacks its own cellular radio for wireless book delivery.
An ex-Google search engine designer is behind a new search engine initiative called Cuil, pronounced ‘cool’, which comes with $33 million in venture capital backing. The service will go live this week. Not quite sure that there is any room left for a new search engine. Cuil is supposed to search a wider number of web pages, and drill into the content of a web page to find search answers.
Widevine Technologies says that it has been selected by Netmax.tv, a global provider of multi-language ethnic television and entertainment, to enable secure distribution of targeted, geo-specific programming to a worldwide audience of Hollywood and Bollywood and other content on Windows, Mac and Linux devices and a wide array of Web browsers.
Pulse~Link this week said that its Wireless-for-HDMI platform has completed certification by administrators of the HDCP content protection specification. This represents the primary certification requirements for the commercial release of its CWave Wireless-for-HDMI products. The first products will be available this fall.