iBiquity Digital, the developer of HD Radio has signed a deal with BMW in the US to offer factory-installed HD Radios as a standard feature in BMW’s 2009 Model Year 7 Series and 6 Series vehicles. The deal was announced at the New York International Auto Show. BMW first included HD Radio as an option in its 2006 6 and 7 Series models.
Last year tiny Latvia said that it would allow people to vote using their mobile phones in its next election, but we are more disturbed by an announcement from Russia’s parliament that allows citizens to vote by mobile phone in the next parliamentary elections there, scheduled for 2011 using a Java based mobile system. Users will have to register their phone number in advance and will be sent a Java routine which allows them to vote, which can only be used once. What’s the betting that the Java votes all end up being for the same candidate.
ZTE in China has its own netbook out for the new Chinese 3G networks which it calls the V60, launched in Beijing. It is based on an Intel Atom CPU and works with China Unicom’s 3G network. ZTE said it will launch more netbooks with TD-CDMA and CDMA2000, the other two 3G standards in use in China. ZTE says most sales will go through 3G operators, not through retail.
Israeli encoder supplier Optibase and UK IPTV set top player Amino have announced an integration between the Optibase EZ TV software and Amino AmiNET set tops. EZ TV now also works with PCs and supports multi-format video feeds in a mosaic view of 1, 4, 9 or 16 simultaneous streams. Amino is one of the leading IPTV set top players globally.
The US National Football League and satellite TV player the Dish Network said this week they have resolved all recent legal issues and Dish can continue supplying the NFL games to its 13.7 million customers.
In the US the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a series of compromises to the patent reform bill after a number of senators got together and hashed out their differences. The bill was rushed through but included formulas for setting penalties. However the final bill may not stand the scrutiny of the full Congress when it meets on this issue. Patent reform in the US has been long overdue and the law is stuck at a level established in 1952. But patent litigation is so long winded and the emergence of patent trolls (who file wide ranging patents on inventions they never plan to use) means that the system has become a tax on innovation, which it was never intended to be. That’s not to say that this reform will get passed or that practices will definitively change even if it is.
Juniper Research says that the recession will cut a huge $13 billion from global mobile entertainment growth over the next five years. So it’s not that the researcher got the numbers wrong the first time, it’s the recession’s fault. Operators are failing to spend to deploy content services and that means revenues have to be less than previous forecasts. Juniper is now saying that mobile entertainment revenues will increase by roughly $13 billion over the next five years, a 50% decrease from the previous projection of $26 billion, with mobile TV taking the brunt of the cutbacks.
YouTube and Universal Music Group plan to launch an online music video venture later this year based around Universal’s entire catalog of 10,000 music videos. The two companies will share ad revenue on the Vevo.com site and on a Vevo channel on YouTube and on a software video player which is designed to go on social-networking pages of other sites. Universal says it will spend tens of millions of dollars on the project and Vevo will be a wholly owned Universal subsidiary.
Dilithium, a specialist in fast video delivery over mobile networks says that its Dilithium Video Optimizer (DVO) will enable content providers to reduce the bandwidth to deliver video to 2.5 and 3G-enabled devices by up to 50%, using dynamic video traffic shaping at the video layer. This will save operators from having to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in network upgrades the company says. The DVO uses on-the-fly transcoding and transrating so that it quickly adjusts to handset capabilities, without the need for any special streaming client on the handset.
The Financial Times said this week that Telecom Italia has launched an appeal against a ruling by Argentina’s anti-monopoly commission which it says effectively confiscates its stake in Telecom Argentina, the country’s second largest telecommunications operator. The Argentina anti-trust commission will block directors being appointed from Telecom Italia because it says that Telefonica effectively controls Telecom Italia as well as Telefonica de Argentina the leading telecom operator. It may have a point, although the Financial Times thinks that it may also have designs on nationalizing the company as well.
US researcher In-Stat says that Digital radio grew 85% between 2007 and 2008, with the Asia Pacific region driving growth. Worldwide, the market for both satellite and terrestrial digital radio, combined, will grow to over 55 million unit shipments by 2012 with a positive impact on each of the key semiconductor suppliers Frontier Silicon, NXP, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments.
The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T is in talks with Apple to extend the time during which it holds the iPhone as an exclusive shifting back a year from mid 2010 to 2011. AT&T told the paper that it will also increasingly emphasize what it does in mobile, and will introduce discounts on its TV and broadband services for mobile customers. In other words a mobile oriented quadruple play, with perhaps the iPhone at the forefront of its appeal.
eBay has decided to sell the StumbleUpon recommendation engine which it bought in 2007 for $75 million, back to its founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, and some, as yet unnamed, investors.
US senator Eric Massa says he will introduce a bill that will ban operators using bandwidth caps on heavy broadband users. Time Warner Cable is said to be testing such a cap in the area he represents, offering $15 per month for a 1GB bandwidth cap, and $2 per GB thereafter with uncapped going as high as $150 a month from its current $40. While there may be some basis for restricting how rapidly uncapped offerings may rise, actually banning caps is unlikely to gain much acceptance, especially since it is widely practiced in other parts of the world. Competition is the answer and in Europe incumbents that introduce capped options find they are rarely bought into.
A broadcaster in North Carolina has partnered with WRAL Transit to put an ATSC M/H TV service onto its buses, which it says constitutes the first public deployment of DTV in Raleigh. All digital TV systems find their way onto buses, but only to demonstrate their value, the true test is seeing lots of individuals take up the service on individual devices. But it’s a start.