The United Arab Emirates regulator TRA has finally granted a ten year license for mobile TV broadcasting services to a group called the Emirates Mobile Television Corporation consortium. It must offer at least 13 TV channels using DVB-H. The consortium includes Etisalat, du, Abu Dhabi Media, Dubai Media, Emirates Communications and MBC. The license was delayed from the middle of 2008 and Etisalat and du will each provide different bouquets.
Norwegian middleware company Appear TV said this week that it had provided a head end in a box to Volia the Ukraine’s largest cable operator. The new head-end station will enable Volia to improve digital TV services for its 500,000 customers in Kyiv.
Chinese mobile chip firm MediaTek has said that it will roll out mobile TV chips which support DVB-H and DVB-T during 2010, says the DigiTimes in Tapei. It is also considering whether or not to produce CMMB mobile TV chips for China.
Qualcomm has established a new subsidiary called Qualcomm Innovation Center to focus on mobile open source platforms. QuIC has brought together a dedicated group of engineers to ‘optimize’ open source software with Qualcomm technology. Rob Chandhok, senior VP software strategy for Qualcomm CDMA will be president and it will contribute to open source initiatives such as Linux and Webkit, and on open source operating systems such as Symbian, Android and Chrome. The only benefit we can see for Qualcomm is that it will be close to these platforms, so may better support them with its chips.
OpenTV and UK DTH market leader BSKyB, have cut a new licensing deal so that OpenTV’s patents and other intellectual property can be used by BSkyB. The two companies plan to work on a proof of concept which could lead to the deployment of OpenTV Core 3 on some of Sky’s set-top boxes. OpenTV Core3 is its next generation middleware which claims to simplify consumer user interfaces, interactive services and application widgets.
Nokia has launched a TD-SCDMA phone, the 6788 in China which came about due to collaboration between Nokia and China Mobile. The devices comes with a wide range of integrated China Mobile apps, and Nokia says this is the first of many TD-SCDMA phones. The 6788 has fast internet speeds and a 5 megapixel and a 2.8 inch QVGA display, sitting on the Symbian S60 platform.
Norwegian browser writer Opera has done some fancy footwork and claims that consumers save $8 billion dollars a year using Opera Mini, which it worked out on the basis that it compresses data and saves download times. Opera Mini users generated 227 million MB of data worldwide this September, the company said.
MediaTek has announced DivX Plus HD Certification on its MT8530 chip designed for Blu-ray players to playback DivX Plus HD video, based on H.264 technology. DivX Plus HD Certification is the highest level of certification available from DivX and supports the playback of all content created with DivX codecs.
Comcast Spotlight, the advertising sales division of Comcast, this week said it would use an advertising platform based on the Arris ConvergeMedia Virtual Interconnect advertising system, which will process ad schedules, verifications and ad copy from multiple providers, markets and time zones for network programming feeds.
Google and YouTube are facing a copyright investigation in Germany after independent record labels, publishers and artists filed complaints against both companies according to Billboard magazine. The complaint says that YouTube has failed to pay royalties due since April of this year and it is also being asked to reveal the names of illegal uploaders to YouTube.
Video search engine blinkx, has announced blinkx Music, a new tool for finding and watching music videos online. The system helps find music videos from a single online gateway. So far it has indexed over 33,000 hours of music video from 10,000 artists and offers search by artist, album, genre or song. Presumably the indexed sites all have permission to play all those music videos.
Do the specifications of all Intel based netbooks look the same to you? Perhaps this is because of the hardware restrictions placed on the design by Intel and Microsoft. Well that may be about to change as Windows 7 comes online, as storage restrictions will go from 160GB to 250GB, and with the arrival of the new Intel 1.83GHz N470 Atom Intel will lift maximum RAM restrictions too, above the 1 GB that are available today.
The European Commission once again is saying it plans to change European copyright law so that companies like Google can sort out permission to scan printed books and distribute digital copies over the Internet. This should include simpler ways of collecting royalties, something the Commission has gone on about for the past three years.
US researcher In-Stat says that the key factors which convince US consumers to buy broadband equipment are speed, security, and range. What other features are there? Color? The least important features were brand, followed by environmental friendliness. The Green message (Color?) seems to be for enterprises, not consumers. Last year and this are the slowest years on record for broadband growth but VoIP enabled routers, DSL, cable gateways and Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) CPE have all gone well. PC-based home networks will grow 19% in 2009, it said.
IPTV video quality management firm Symmetricom, has added features to its Q-Advisor NOC management software. It cites advanced reporting and troubleshooting capabilities to ensure quality of service as the improvements. Symmetricom’s Q-Advisor is just that, a piece of software which can advise on queues in the network, details of which come to it from lots of probes around the network. New reporting capabilities include a per-channel, time-based view of quality levels as well as a top-10 video service impairments report.
US securities analysts at Cowen & Co reckon that Activision-Blizzard’s ‘Guitar Hero’ game is not living up to expectations, but it won’t do enough damage to take the company off its current recommendation. Because Hero only sold 500,000 units since September 1, Cowen says the title will only sell 1.5 million units in its first year of release, whereas previously Cowen pitched it as 4.7 million units. Activision will still see strong sales of the next version of ‘Call of Duty,’ ‘Starcraft’ and ‘World of Warcraft’ titles.
US IPTV middleware company Minerva Networks, said this week that VTC Digicom, one of the largest telecommunications service providers, which has the second largest TV network in Vietnam, has selected Minerva’s iTVManager platform for its IPTV service. A first phase will roll out the software to 100,000 homes offering HD, PPV, VOD and DVR. The system now has its own Widget Engine which blends TV with Internet video.
Orca Interactive and AirTies last week joined forces to present a pre-integrated wireless IPTV and Web TV system. This will include Orca’s RiGHTv IPTV middleware, with its Compass content discovery system and AirTies’ set top box with built-in support for wireless and 3D graphics.
UK DTH supplier BSkyB had net additions for the last quarter of 94,000, considerably better than any quarter in the last few years. This takes Sky to over 9.5 million customers. Gross additions of 362,000 were triggered by strong demand for the HD version of the Sky+ DVR plus its triple play offerings. Churn was up due to economic conditions price increases and being more strict with customers in arrears. Part of the improvement may be because it swapped out seven million viewing cards, so perhaps there was a little piracy going on which is now extinguished. ARPU is up £39 year over the year to £469.
Advanced TV News reports that News Corp is in favour of making US consumers pay for Hulu and sees no other way it will ever make a profit. CEO Chase Carey said publicly that subscription fees could come as early as 2010.
Broadcom quarterly results showed revenue of $1.254 billion up 20.6% sequentially, but still down 3.4% on the quarter a year before. Net income was $84.6 million, vastly improved from the second quarter when it was $13.4 million, but not yet back to the $164.9 million it was a year ago.
A UK specialist in TV consulting Farncombe Consulting, has published a second White Paper on TV Conditional Access, which proposes a replacement for the DVB Common Scrambling Algorithm (CSA) which it says is getting old. It calls for a next-generation version of the CSA based on a ‘toolkit’ approach which mixes both hardware and software elements.