When we last left the umpteenth merger attempt to bring Kabel Deutschland into the same hands as Unity Media and Kabel Baden-Wuerttemberg, the three biggest cable operators in German, with just under 16 million customers collectively, it was being blocked by the German anti-trust authority in April. Now management at KDG say that the deal is off the table and that it will look to acquire some lower tier cable operations instead. The deal will re-emerge, we are sure, at some point in the future because they are all owned by Private Equity groups.
Despite rumors suggesting that the ATSC M/H standard has some last minute hitches, it is now being raised from candidate standard to proposed standard. It has one more round of votes to go through before it is a full standard and that is scheduled to take place in August and the standard could be published as early as September. ATSC M/H transmitter systems are already in the field and are for the most part software upgradeable at the transmitter, in case there are any last minute changes to the standard.
US cable R&D body CableLabs said this week that it has issued specifications called the Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (SaFI), designed to standardize on the way interactive and addressable advertising is carried out on US cable systems. The SaFI interfaces will allow operators to offer interactive and addressable ad products using consistent technologies, metrics and interfaces across a national footprint. These interfaces will provide a standard way to create messaging from an ad, the format of those messages and how they are identified for campaign management. ARRIS, BIAP, BlackArrow, Cisco, Concurrent, Ensequence, Motorola, OpenTV, RGB Networks, Sigma Systems, Tandberg TV, This Technology, TVN Entertainment, and UniSoft all contributed to the standards.
British Telecom was hit with a storm of protest over privacy issues when it said it would adopt the Phorm Webwise advertising system, which serves adverts to web browsers based on their previous web history. Now it will drop all plans to deploy the technology and says the reason is because it has other priorities ‘ nothing to do with consumer unrest.
UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom has been singled out for criticism by the UK opposition Conservative Party, currently not in power. It says that it is too expensive to run, along with 790 other semi-governmental bodies and it may have to cut its funding if and when it gets into power. The problem says the party leader David Cameron, is that it currently has a policy making remit, and that should be cut back, as that should be left to elected representatives. Ofcom has probably earned its budget back several times over in its contribution in bringing an antiquated telecommunications regime in the UK up to speed with other European rivals, and we’re sure this is a snub aimed at the fact that the Labour Party’s working document on digitizing the UK was written by an ex-leader of Ofcom.
The new Transformers movie Revenge of the Fallen, has topped US box office numbers for the Summer pulling down $200 million in domestic ticket sales in its first five days. It took in $112 million in its first weekend through Paramount Studios, which is distributing it for DreamWorks. Once again mere actors, acting a strong story line have been supplanted by computer generated graphics. The sequel is on track to overtake the original movie’s total income over the next month or so and has now gone international, and was at $387 million when it reported figures last week. Last year the Dark Knight was the film that single handedly kept the recession at bay during the Summer, but Revenge is still below its sales figures. Critics called the film a visual-effects extravaganza ‘ but that’s what people appear to want.
US researcher Parks Associates says that it can see there being 640 million broadband households in the world by 2013 and cites new value added services such as video and social-networking, as well as stimulus funding, which will help the subscriber numbers to rise. The number of broadband households grew by 18% in 2008 to over 400 million. Asia-Pacific is the largest market, with 160 million subs, and it will have over 49% of the global market share by 2013. In the US the government will soon release billions of dollars from the stimulus package to promote affordable high-speed Internet services in rural areas.
Just as it seemed inevitable that Nortel would be broken up, a private equity firm has come up with a proposal that would keep the Canadian vendor intact, and could scupper Nokia Siemens’ bid for the CDMA and LTE wireless assets (and a likely bid by Avaya for the enterprise business). US firm MatlinPatterson Global Advisors, a specialist in ‘distressed investments’, confirmed yesterday that it plans to submit a proposal to reorganize Nortel in a way that would generate more value than selling the wireless infrastructure activities to NSN. It will seek to put together a group of investors to support its plan and recapitalize the bankrupt firm. Such a bid would entail a debt-for-equity swap and must be submitted by July 24, the date set by bankruptcy courts to consider NSN’s $650m ‘stalking horse’ bid.
Apple has filed new patents pointing to potential future iPhones with cameras, enhanced haptics feedback and fingerprint ID technology. The patents describe touch-based input components which provide localized haptic feedback, for instance for in-car usage, when a driver cannot look at the screen; and a method for controlling an electronic device by detecting and using a person’s fingerprints, possible for security to access the device.