As Telefonica revealed its third quarter results this week, it showed that IPTV subs were 654,000 in its native Spain, but other pay TV efforts in its holdings dwarfed that, with pay TV across the board up 15.1% in revenues terms and Peru reaching 723,000 customers, Brazil 509,000 and the total coming to around 2.48 million pay TV customers including Chile, Venezeula, Coumbia and the Czech Republic. Spain saw the addition of 45,000 in the quarter.
The rump of Tiscali, mostly Italian DSL and dial up customers, lost €418 million in the last quarter including €344.5 million due to the loss it crystallized when it sold the UK arm off cheaply, plus charges of €49.6 million in debt restructuring. It still has 552 million DSL customers but still owed €413 million in net debt, prior to a rights issue, just completed and a debt write-off.
Years after we had seen the applications shown in a Microsoft Mediaroom lab, leading US customer AT&T has launched two new TV applications for U-verse customers, one is Caller ID, which shows callers and voicemail notifications on the TV screen for the phone line, and Offers On Demand, which lets users redeem a coupon code on-screen for discounts on movie rentals. AT&T now says that it has introduced 20 free TV apps since the launch of the IPTV service, including 12 this year alone.
After all these years of talking about it, and 6 years since it launched the biggest loss in corporate history with a 98 billion write down, Time Warner is set to spin off AOL next month for a value close to $3.5 billion. Just a few years ago AOL was still valued at $20 billion and at its peak when it bought Time Warner it was as high as $163 billion. The clicks and mortar merger of the two companies is an example of how not to go about a merger.
UK private equity firm Terra Firma, which had said it would turn UK record label EMI around, has been forced to take a write down of 90% of the acquisition’s value in its latest accounts. It bought the record label EMI for a value of $4.8 billion in 2007, after the firm fought not to be merged with Warner Music, where it would obviously have been much happier.
US cable supplier Arris says it has demonstrated a series of Advanced Advertising use cases at the CableLabs Advanced Advertising Interop last week in Louisville, US. It showed Dynamic Video On Demand with ad insertions using audience qualifiers, and the same with linear TV as well as Interactive Telescoping of Advertisements and Interactive TV using the EBIF standard.
The Meo Mediaroom IPTV installation Portugal Telecom helped the company keep up its fixed line revenues this quarter contributing 79,000 new pay TV subscribers in the quarter and 193,000 so far in 2009, to reach 505,000 households. Pay TV customers already represents 19% of traffic and is on 62.2% of the ADSL customer base.
Dilithium, the mobile video specialist said this week that Indonesian operator Telkomsel has selected Dilithium’s ViVas service delivery platform to provide multimedia and enhanced video services. Telkomsel was one of Dilithiuim’s earliest customers and this is repeat, or at least extended business.
LogNet Group, says that MTtv in the Ukraine has deployed its MaxBill product suite to cover customer care, order management, trouble ticketing, product management, billing, invoicing and collection. MYtv recently launched a new digital satellite television service in Ukraine where it offers dozens of channels as well as interactive television, push video on demand, pay per view and PVR.
US mobile TV encoder specialist Envivio says that French operator Bouygues Telecom, has built a carrier grade video headend with its
4Caster C4 video encoder. It encodes video for the Bouygues 3G streaming mobile video service, which offers 60 TV channels
Not that it will be scaring Apple any time soon, but Microsoft says that it will launch its Zune entertainment distribution brand outside the US next year but mostly in the form of the VoD service rather than the MP3 player. It will deliver films through PCs and the Xbox 360 installed base.
Impala, the International MHEG Promotion Alliance announced that South Africa, via its Digital Dzonga Advisory Council, has selected MHEG-5 as the interactive TV middleware for its digital switchover.
Following on from a successful DTT trial that began last year, the SABC, South Africa’s public broadcaster, led the process of developing a MHEG-5 profile for South Africa to meet local needs. The profile has now been finalised and the overall receiver specifications are now close to completion.
OpenTV said this week that Australia’s Foxtel pay TV service has launched its next generation platform using OpenTV middleware. Foxtel has been a long term OpenTV customer, so it’s no great surprise. Foxtel Next Generation will offer 200 channels, 15 HD channels, and interactive services.