The phenomenal success of India’s satellite TV operations can be seen in the NDS boast this week that its partner Tata Sky has just made it past its four millionth customer in India. The latest million subscribers were added in just over seven months. The service was only launched three years ago and was one of the first two DTH services there. Now there are six. The system uses NDS VideoGuard conditional access system, MediaHighway middleware, the NDS EPG, and its DVR design.
Telefonica has launched an RFP for set top and encoder suppliers for a new hybrid service combining IPTV and DTH or IPTV and cable which it will launch across Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru. Telefonica has every type of pay TV down in South America depending upon geography and historical accidents. So far 42 manufacturers are said to have put in a bid. The results will be known in a month and the cheapest deal will be accepted (as long as the thing works). In Chile Telefonica already does something like this, offering IPTV in one area, through two set tops one which can also receive DTH and another which enables VOD over broadband.
According to Pyramid Research the global mobile gaming market will grow at a 16.6% compound Annual Growth rate to reach $18 billion in 2014. This will be driven by the explosive mobile subscriber growth in emerging markets. The report includes in-depth country analyses of Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, and South Africa.
RealNetworks second quarter results show revenue of $135.7 million, down by 11%, with music revenue up to $40.5 million, and Technology Products and Solutions down to $46.2 million, Games revenue down at $29.8 million, and Media Software and Services revenue disastrously down by 34% to $19.3 million. The company lost $188 million, after non-cash goodwill impairment charges of $175.6 million. The Rhapsody joint venture has also laid off 9% of its staff this week.
Powerline Communication technology from DS2 and Comtrend have been selected this week to deliver the mio TV IPTV service by SingTel in Singapore. The system offers a data transfer rate up to 200Mbps to deliver multiroom video. DS2 supplies the chips and Comtrend’s makes the Power Grid 902 adapter.
US analyst group In-Stat has a report on the future of USB connections for media, and reckons that Digital TVs which have a USB port will grow to 140 million units shipped in 2013 while USB-enabled LCD PC monitors will grow to about 70 million units, propelled by a CAGR of over 150%. Blueray DVD players with USB will see a CAGR of over 90%. These growth segments will complement the enormous volume markets such as handsets, where internal USB capability can be found in more than 1 billion units shipped annually, and where USB ports are becoming much more common.
RGB Networks, a video processing specialist, said this week it has upgraded its Dynamic Bandwidth Manager VOD transrater to support the MPEG-4/H.264 video format. As cable operators around the world take advantage of H.264, RGB’s says its DBM can unlock bandwidth efficiencies. By deploying the DBM, it claims operators can deliver up to 50% more VOD programming on existing QAM.
OpenTV says it has teamed up with Jinni to bring next generation search and recommendation to the TV. It combines the OpenTV Core2 Search with Jinni’s ‘Mood-Based’ content discovery. There are lots and lots of these search systems around, but OpenTV is likely to be a strong enough brand to carry this off better than most.
Just before we broke for the holiday, a story broke that Skype could be closed down within a year, so we thought it was worth putting in for the record. If that happened it would leave fixed and mobile Skype users stranded and set VoIP back decades. In eBay’s last financial filings it turns out that the underlying peer to peer software which Skype relies on, called Joltid, did not change hands when eBay bought the service a few years back. Now the owners of Joltid, Skype inventors Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, have cancelled the license for eBay to use the software, claiming eBay showed the Joltid code to someone else in a patent dispute, which was against the contract. It will probably amount to nothing in the end, but we thought we should keep you posted.