iSuppli says that the market for image sensors will decline this year before it begins to grow once more and go from $7.4 billion and 1.4 billion units in 2008, to $6.0 billion and 1.3 billion units in 2009, down 18.1%. By 2012 it will have recovered to $9.7 billion. During this time there will begin a gradual shift from Charge Couple Devices to CMOS chips driving the market. We wonder what that will do to one of Sony’s truly dominant markets, for all forms of consumer cameras?
Israeli WHDI Wireless HD chip maker Amimon has raised $10 million in its fourth rounding of funding which was led by Stata Venture Partners, and the round includes most investors from prior rounds. Amimon says it is now shipping chips in volume going into products in the US, Europe and Japan.
New Zealand has introduced another version of a ‘three-strikes’ law, but it has added a mediation and a tribunal process. Repeat piracy offenders can still lose their Internet accounts. Pirates get one warning, then a cease and desist order from their ISP, then any further breach and a copyright holder can apply to the Copyright Tribunal to compel the ISP to reveal the suspected file-swapper’s identity. This then leads to a government-approved mediation process and finally loss of their internet account.
BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm, has finally managed revenues of over £1 billion ($1.64 billion) for the first time. Profits were down partly due to the write-offs on Kangaroo and a video distribution deal with Woolworths which collapsed when the retailer did. Profits were just £85.7 million ($140 million), which when you consider that its only role is to sell around $5 billion worth of content which the BBC has made, is a pretty poor return.
Blockbuster has cut a deal with Samsung to put its online service through Samsung devices such as its internet enabled HDTVs, home theaters and Blu-ray players. The deal begins in the Fall and Blockbuster will sell certain Samsung devices in its stores, including models of Samsung LCD and Plasma HDTVs. Blockbuster already has deals with Vizio and TiVo for its online service the same as Netflix, but Netflix also has Sony, Microsoft Xbox, LG Electronics and Roku as well.
Macrovision said this week that France’s Canal+ Group, one of the major pay TV services in France on both cable and satellite, has signed a licensing agreement to use Macrovision’s EPG patent portfolio.
Nero, the inventor of something called liquid media technology, has upgraded its deal with Taiwan’s Acer Group, one of the world’s largest PC manufacturers, which will now bundle Nero 9 Essentials, an OEM version of the Nero 9 integrated digital media and home entertainment software suite, on all desktop systems sold globally, including the Acer, Gateway, Packard Bell and eMachines brands.
A US researcher called Berg Insight says that despite the recession shipments of GPS enabled GSM/WCDMA handsets jumped 178.6% during 2008 to 78.0 million units. These phones are growing at a compound annual growth rate of 46.5% and shipments are forecasted to reach 770 million units by 2014.
TorrentFreak points out that although France’s National Assembly cut the teeth from the French three strikes piracy law, there is another attempt passing through the French Senate which would mean cases of suspected file-swappers could be presented to a judge, who would be empowered to fast-track decisions in minutes and could cut off Internet accounts, impose fines and prison sentences. Will France’s National Assembly pass it? Of course not.
British Telecom says that it will now roll out another one million homes with fiber based broadband, making its commitment so far a total of 1.5 million homes, to be completed by Summer 2010. 69 locations across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales were chosen and eventually BT says it will invest £1.5 billion ($2.5 billion) to bring very high speed broadband to 10 million homes by 2012 out of a total of around 24 million homes in the UK.
Orange in France has been given a two year period to make use of the content that it has acquired this year, including its sports channel, before it must make it available to other services, says the French competition authority. This decision follows a win over Canal+, Cegetel and Free about not having to give away its content immediately, and will drive IPTV sign-ups for a while yet.
According to Advanced TV News, News Corp’s Sky Deutschland has cut off supply off its channels from Deutsche Telekom’s IPTV service T-Entertain. Given the way Deutsche Telekom has ignored European directives on opening up its network, it is unlikely to get much help on this from official channels. Sky Deutschland used to be Premiere.
Digital broadcast chip maker Microtune said this week it had acquired Auvitek for $9 million in cash and stock, plus some earnout potential. Microtune was the first company to put a TV tuner on one chip and China’s Auvitek supplies DTV demodulator circuits. That sounds like a deal that it going to get Microtune thrown out by a number of its existing partners, although Auvitek may concentrate on the new Chinese terrestrial broadcast standard (if it ever arrives).
US encoder maker Envivio said that it has an encoding and DRM protected platform called SilverLiveTV for working with Microsoft Silverlight 3, designed for evaluating and developing video services with the new Microsoft technology. SilverLiveTV enables operators to offer PC and Mac users multiple channels of video content over wired and wireless networks from ingest and uses Microsoft’s own PlayReady content protection. Despite the huge delay in PlayReady, it sneaked out in May this year, and services using it are expected in the Fall. Silverlight 3 uses Silverlight Smooth Streaming, based on Move technology, a streaming company which Microsoft invested in last year.
iSuppli says that rising prices of NAND flash means that what was a promising market for Solid State Drives in notebooks is likely to fizzle out. Average pricing for 16Gbit NAND flash rose to $4.10 in the second quarter of 2009, up 127.8% from the fourth quarter of 2008.
UK behavioural researcher Actual Customer Behaviour was cited in InformITV this week saying that UK consumers withy DVRs watch a lot more broadcast TV than they say they do. Most DVR owners exaggerate their use substantially, it said, with the survey concluding with intense studies of just 19 people in 5 homes. One man claimed to watch recorded programs 70% of the time but actually watched live television 88% of the time. The study was conducted for a consortium including Ofcom, the BBC, Channel 4, BT Vision and Microsoft, among others.
TV maker Sharp has decided to join Sony, Samsung and Panasonic with its own range of Internet connected TVs using the Aquos brand, which will connect to the internet both for content, but also for customer support. The device will be called the Aquos Net and can be delivered on the whole screen or a share the screen with a traditional TV program. It will also offer an Aquos Gallery of high-definition scenery.
US chip maker Telegent Systems, the company that makes chips so that phone users can watch analog TV signals, has announced that a number of operators in Latin America are adopting phones with free-to-air analog TV from Telegent. Since December of last year, subsidiaries of both Am’rica Movil and Telefonica in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru have deployed multiple models of Telegent-enabled TV handsets, the company said. It cites research that says there will be market demand for 150 million analog TV handsets by 2013.