Ireland’s budding sporting TV business Setanta Sports has hit something of a wall since missing out on most of the bidding for UK soccer, with Sky once again taking the honors. Now as a result of that auction two large investors, conglomerate Doughty Hanson and Goldman Sachs, have written their stock down to zero. Setanta had two Premier League packages but lost one key package in auctions for the 2010-13 seasons.
Advanced Television reports that the Spanish Government will change its laws so that broadcasters can sell or lease DTT (Digital Terrestrial TV) licenses once they have had them for five years. They will be able to rent or lease up to 50% of their capacity. However if a winner of a DTT license does not begin transmissions inside a year, the license will be taken away. The new law also says that 51% of transmissions must be of European produced material and it has made provisions to introduce mobile TV in Spain by issuing a DVB-H license.
Vodafone will offer music without digital rights management or copy protection software on its handsets. It should have this available to customers by this Summer. It has signed new deals with Universal, Sony, and EMI on DRM free music it says. This is part of a prolonged shift towards DRM free online and mobile music began with Apple’s iTunes adopting it.
Swedish VoD server company Edgeware, which invented VoD servers using banks of flash memory instead of hard disk drives, said it will open US offices in San Jose, California with David Appleman, a former Motorola senior sales executive, leading all Edgeware sales efforts there.
IBM is apparently in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems says the Wall Street Journal for between $7 and $8 billion. Sun has many businesses, but it best known for its Unix servers which brought it to prominence in the 1980s ad 90s. IBM and Hewlett-Packard are now the dominant server suppliers and Sun has been weakening. However Sun also created Java, which provides important service layers in handsets, set tops and of course PCs. IBM is perhaps the best company in the world at exploiting Java and it will be interesting to see what it will do if it ever owns it. However this is mostly about consolidating the server business, and is still only a rumor.
US researcher NPD Group said this week that the number of Internet users paying for digital music increased by just over 8 million in 2008 to 36 million. Purchases of online digital music downloads increased by 29% since last year and now account for 33% percent of all music tracks purchased in the US. NPD’s Digital Music Study also revealed there were nearly 17 million fewer CD buyers in 2008 compared to the prior year, suggesting that CDs are now officially in terminal decline.
US encoder specialist Harmonic has introduced the DiviCom Electra 8000, which looks like its top end real time encoder, which it describes as the world’s first encoding and transcoding platform to support MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-2 codecs in SD and HD formats, up to 1080p 50/60. By supporting MPEG2, Harmonic can push this at existing cable implementations and says they can deliver up to four HD MPEG-2 services in one QAM. Also that satellite operators can increase channel count per transponder using this encoder, which compresses constant bit-rate HD video to 5 Mbps or less. ATSC Broadcasters and IPTV operators are also valid targets for this device, the company says and it can do picture in picture, and has integrated statistical multiplexing.
A new report from The Diffusion Group says that the number of global broadband households will approach 440 million by 2010 and top 1.2 billion by 2030. During that same time, the number of broadband-enabled home networks will grow from 150 million in 2010 to more than 1.0 billion in 2030. With this type of infrastructure in place broadband video will grow dramatically the company says. No kidding.
DirecTV has not only won over AT&T this year to sell its direct to home satellite TV, but it has now added smaller US CLEC telco, Cavalier Telephone, which says this will help it go up against cable operators. The idea is that it will offer a triple play with its own broadband and voice for substantially what it claims is $240 a year less than cable. We wonder what this will do to Cavalier’s existing IPTV system which it was so proud of back in 2006. It was one of the first to use H.264 encoding and used Zhone DSLAMs, Tut encoders, middleware and VoD servers from Kasenna, Secure Media DRM and Amino set tops in a triple pay that cost just $95 per month. It looks to us like it is phasing IPTV out.
US transmitter company Harris has tied up a OEM deal with Roundbox, a specialist in mobile broadcast software, to offer a bundled mobile broadcast system in the US which includes the Roundbox Broadcast Server integrated with the Harris ATSC Mobile DTV broadcast system. The system will be available for delivery in mid-March.
While most of the Apple hysteria this week was reserved for the latest release of its iPhone OS, it also slid out a tiny new Shuffle MP3 player which it is billing as the world’s smallest music player at nearly half of the size of the previous model. It also added the feature that the player talks to you, telling you the next song title, artist and playlist name. The whole thing is smaller that an AA battery and yet holds 1,000 songs. It is worn rather than carried and costs just $79.