Broadband TV News has been saying for a while that News Corp is on the verge of selling itself out of the Central and Eastern European markets ‘ although it has never quite said why. It has now disclosed more detail with the Bulgarian national commercial station bTV to be sold by the end of this year, which has already had bidders. It will also sell operations in Poland, Latvia and Serbia. These markets are rife with piracy and are fairly poor, with low Pay TV penetration, which might have something to do with it.
Sony Computer Entertainment America said this week that it will introduce a new 160GB PlayStation 3 entertainment system in the US as part of the limited-edition Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune PS3 system bundle. It will be available in November and cost $500 and be bundled with the game and a dualshock wireless controller. The previously announced 80GB PS3 system at $400 has already started shipping to retailers.
Motion control application specialist Hillcrest Labs in the US said this week it has taken out a suit against Nintendo for patent infringement with the US International Trade Commission (ITC). It has also begun a separate patent infringement suit in the US District Court in Maryland against Nintendo related to the Wii video game system. Its patents refer to handheld three dimensional pointing devices and a navigation interface display system that graphically organizes content for display on a television. We have no way of knowing if these suits will have any merit, but if they do, Nintendo would be in a tight spot. Wonder why it didn’t come out before?
US researcher In-Stat says that there will be 200 million home networks installed globally by the end of 2008. This has been driven by rising broadband subscribers, the desire to share bandwidth, residential gateways being supplied by Telcos and rapid increases in Asia/Pacific. But compared to previous years, the growth of the total market for broadband CPE is slowing, but is expected to remain positive through at least 2012. It says it is worried though for 80211n Wi-Fi, because people mostly don’t see why it’s different from 80211g. Unit shipments of home network CPEs grew 15% in 2007 to 149 million In-Stat said.
China Telecom’s $4 billion CDMA network upgrade has been won by Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel-Lucent, who will get roughly 40%, 40% and 20%, respectively. ZTE will also supply SMS technology and will share the supply of WAP gateways with Alcatel. Huawei will manage the national MMS exchange gateway and KJava download platform.
China Telecom has also told its outlying regions that they must buy IPTV systems from either ZTE, UTStarcom or Alcatel-Lucent and has outlined a longer list of set top and other providers. The move was reported in local China watcher web sites, and will accelerate the drive to wire up China, already past 1 million IPTV subscribers and last month the company ordered a further 500,000 IPTV set tops.
We love the idea of Bandstocks, reported in the UK daily newspaper the Guardian this week. You pay any number of £10 ($20) chunks of money to buy shares in a band, they get to cut a CD once they have collected enough money, and the investors each get a free CD once they have recorded it. Investors also get a share of profits from sales and licensing, and a credit on the album cover. If this takes off, goodbye record labels.
US film watching newspaper Billboard says that four Japanese record labels have been single out by the Japanese Fair Trade Commission as having illegally monopolized the local ring tone market. Sony Music, Avex Network, Victor Entertainment and Universal Music Japan have all filed lawsuits seeking to nullify the ruling. They are said to have supplied content exclusively to a single content aggregator Label Mobile, which they jointly owned.
Macrovisioin’s Gemstar TV Guide has extended its licensing deal with Sony and its Interactive Program Guide will now be integrated with PlayTV, a combined TV tuner and DVR based on the Playstation 3, due out later this year. PlayTV will launch in the UK in September and the rest of Europe will follow shortly.
For a paltry $38 million Virgin Mobile USA has completed the already announced acquisition of US MVNO Helio. Shareholders SK Telecom and Earthlink opted to take shares in Virgin Mobile and both SK Telecom and Virgin Group will each invest $25 million in the entity. The deal was previously contingent upon Helio successfully cutting its costs, which it has now done.
US satellite TV operator Dish Networks says that it now has the best picture on any US pay TV service, given that all of it, both HD and SD is now delivered in H.264. It also says it is offering movies in 1080p resolution, and has committed to 150 national HD channels by the end of the year.
Microsoft has made a strategic investment in Move Networks, a specialist provider of Internet TV services. Microsoft joined in Move’s third round of investment following a previous deal for Move to work with Microsoft Silverlight, the cross-browser, multiplatform plug-in for delivering video, among other things. Move will also begin using Microsoft codecs after the deal and its DRM. No details on the size of the investment were given.
France Telecom has been trying to launch an IPTV service in the UK for some years, previously attempting it through its Wannadoo ISP, which is now merged under the Orange brand, but still no IPTV service. Now IPTV Watch says that the announcement is imminent, but most IPTV services which do not have the support of the incumbent Telco have been failing across Europe, and have been put up for sale. Selling pay TV in the UK is tough, given that there are already multiple suppliers and that Free to Air TV efforts are growing at a tremendous rate.
Inmarsat has said that it wishes to launch an S-Band satellite in Europe, as part of its bid for a European wide S-Band license. The satellite that it has in mind would not be in place before 2011, while SES Astra and Eutelsat are both planning a joint S-Band satellite by 2009 which would offer DVB-SH Mobile TV among other services. Inmarsat would use a Thales Spacebus for mobile broadcast and two-way telecommunications services. In the US S-Band in 2.1 GHz is being used to offer Mobile Satellite Services.
India’s Reliance which has been testing IPTV simply forever, says it will launch service within 2008. In 2007 Reliance said that it would work with Microsoft on IPTV, and announce a total spend of $500 million, which we said was both ridiculous and misleading, since broadband service and pay TV service pricing there would never see that paid back.
US Researcher In-Stat says that cable telephony subscribers are continuing to grow, which is no surprise, and that there are almost 8 million new subscribers added globally over the past 12 months. Growth in the US is strongest, as cable operators there have begun offering full VoIP network architectures. Cable telephony service revenues will reach $12.6 billion in 2008, up from $10.7 billion in 2007 says In-Stat and subscribers will reach 37 million by the end of 2008, and rise to over 64 million by 2012. Assuming incumbent Telcos don’t do something radical to stop it.