Envivio revealed this week it landed a deal at China’s largest television network, China Central Television (CCTV), to supply an IPTV pilot in Beijing with over 80 Envivio 4Caster encoders. CCTV is one of the companies licensed to provide IPTV services in China and is the official Internet and Mobile Broadcaster for the 2008 Olympic Games.
Harmonic announced that Bell Aliant will use its DiviCom Electra 5400 SD encoders for an MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) upgrade to upgrade services throughout Canada’s Atlantic coast. The upgrade allows customers to watch Aliant TV on up to three TV sets in their homes.
The High-Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance (HANA) this week announced plans to release an Entertainment Box reference design based on the new 1394 Over Coax international standard from the 1394 Trade Association. Products based on the reference design will let consumers download HD content from any broadband connection or HD cable set-top box (STB) and watch it in any room in their home with a coax jack and a remote control. This follows on from the 1394 Coax standard approved earlier this month. The standard uses Pulse-Link CWave UWB chips. The box reference design will be available in the 4th quarter.
US researcher Multimedia Intelligence says that the market for video surveillance equipment is expanding into the consumer market and this will turn it into a semiconductor opportunity of $260 million by 2012, up from $37.9 million now. This includes applications from simple doorbell cameras to remote surveillance and recording services.
A UK broadband comparison web site Top 10 Broadband, has ranked local broadband offerings after testing 310,000 lines. O2 won the fastest broadband and highest customer satisfaction awards, with an average download speed of 6.128 Mbps and a customer rating of 3.84 out of 5. Cellular group 3 led the mobile broadband offerings and Virgin Media the best broadband bundle.
Napster has lost 52,000 music service subscribers during the second quarter and posted a large loss for the period as well and is down to 708,000 customers at the end of June. It expects revenues to be flat in the current quarter as well and is clearly suffering from being in the same market as iTunes, and the fact that online music is making the shift to cellular handsets, where Napster also plays, but is not as dominant a brand as it was online.
News Corp controlled UK DTH supplier BSkyB is planning a huge investment into arts based TV channels by offering Sky Arts 1, Sky Arts 2 and Sky Arts HD to put out 36 hours of arts programming each day. Sky Arts 1 will offer contemporary and cult programming, including live rock concerts, documentaries and the celebrity ‘hijack’ series. Sky Arts 2 have more classical art, such as opera and classical music.
CBS Interactive said that it has experienced dramatic increases in traffic across after buying CNET Networks, according to figures released by comScore Media Metrix. This is the first month that CBS Interactive has been integrated with CNET. CNET.com increased by 22% in terms of the unique visitors visiting the site during July.
Broadcom said this week that the US International Trade Commission has turned down the request of SiRF Technology to review its decision that Broadcom’s Global Locate does not infringe SiRF’s GPS patents.
Hotspot numbers and usage are growing rapidly says a report from US research company In-Stat, but access revenues do not appear to be keeping up. This is because operators have started bundling hotspot access, in order to secure customer loyalty to other services. Its survey showed an increase in reluctance to pay for hotspot access, with almost 50% respondents saying they only use free hotspots.
Swedish IPTV middleware company Dreampark has picked up its seventh Scandinavian customer in the shape of Norwegian ISP RingNett. Dreampark also counts operators Canal Digital, Dansk Bredb’nd, FastTV, iVisjon, Smile Content and Viasat among its Scandinavian client base.
UK regulator Ofcom has produced a report on just how fast copper broadband lines can eventually go, looking into the theoretical maximum speeds which might one day be achieved over the lines laid in the UK. It found 18% of UK households are just 2 kilometers from the exchange and could achieve data rates above 50Mbps. But it also thinks that the upstream modem could be moved to the street cabinet, in which case almost 100% of households could achieve that 50Mbps.
The US antitrust authorities have given their blessing to EA Games taking over Grand Theft Auto publisher Take Two Interactive, but as we suggested in earlier Faultline’s it’s getting too late to integrate the businesses by Christmas, so EA has allowed its $2 billion hostile take over offer to expire. EA said that it would instead try to enter private talks with Take Two.
Research firm NPD said that games console sales in the US jumped 35% and that software sales went up 48% in July. The Nintendo Wii sold 555,000 units while the Sony PlayStation 3 sold 224,900 units, once again outselling the Microsoft Xbox 360 which shipped just 204,800 units. The PS2 continued to sell 155,500 consoles.