Japanese consumer electronics major Panasonic has agreed to buy a majority stake in smaller rival Sanyo for about $4.6 billion. Sanyo is another diversified group, but is best known for making cellular handsets, and rechargeable batteries, including those used in handsets but also far larger ones used in hybrid electric cars. The deal has been known about for over a year, and was agreed by dominant shareholders Goldman Sachs, Sumitomo and Daiwa Securities and shares have changed hands today.
Point Topic is moving away from counting broadband lines and now has a report out on IPTV saying that by Q2 there were 26.3 million IPTV subscribers worldwide, up 53%, from 17.1 million a year before. Much of the growth was in Western Europe and Asia, but US operators are catching up and IPTV subscribers there grew 86%, compared with 47% in Western Europe.
The Italian free to air satellite TV service Tiv’Sat has reached a colossal 570,000 of smart cards in circulation says Advanced TV News, within just four months of going live. It has shipped these to manufacturers of decoders and TV sets, and had only expected to ship 300,000. Actual activations are running at 1500 a day. Tiv’Sat is owned by RAI, Mediaset and Telecom Italia, but is open to all other broadcasters.
Mikros Image, a French post-production service and Civolution, the Philips management buyout of watermarking technologies, have announced a version of Civolution’s Nextguard video watermarking system for HD signals in 4:4:4 format, which inserts a watermark during video duplication. Most pay TV services offer TV in 4:2:1 with contribution systems usually in 4:2:2. We’re not sure what uses 4:4:4, unless it’s from cameras through the editing process.
German flat TV market Loewe says that from now on all of its flat-screen TVs will come with internet access built in, using its new MediaNetwork 2.0 software, which converts and plays most internet video formats. This allows viewers to watch web TV, podcasts and YouTube video plus offer customizable radio streaming options under the control of a remote. As far as we can work out, it’s not free and open internet access, but it works with about 100 film distributor partners and a number of specific named services. The system uses the Fraunhofer Institute’s recommendation engine to create music playback lists.
India has decided to impose anti-dumping duties on a number of Chinese telecoms suppliers for SDH (Sonet) equipment, with as much as a 236% import tax charged to Fiberhome, while Huawei has attracted a 50% duty and 29% is being charged for both ZTE and Alcatel-Shanghai Bell. Even the Chinese subsidiary of Israeli telecoms specialist ECI was hit with a 93% penalty. The moves come after a long investigation after a complaint by Tejas Networks. The move may go a long way to explain why Huawei was suddenly kicked out of a major cellular contract by BSNL recently.
Chinese and South African handset maker ThL Mobile has launched something it calls the Mi-TV for 2000 Rand ($270), an analog TV phone which can receive broadcasts from e.tv and SABC. It also holds two SIM cards. This is almost certainly based on the US chip from Telegent, which has shipped 50 million analog TV chips worldwide, and is in direct competition with Multichoice and its digital broadcasts using DVB-H technology, which have been on trial for some years there, awaiting a license. It is understood that Multchoice DStv will get a temporary license to offer DVB-H coverage of the World Soccer cup.
News Corp is thought to be in the process of buying Flixster, a social networking site for movies and plans to merge it with an IGN site it owns called Rotten Tomatoes which offers premium content, reviews, trailers and news. Flixster was founded in 2006 and raised $7 million and it has a hit movie application on the iPhone.
Multimedia processors are as good a way as any for Broadcom to improve its position on the cellphone and its latest product in this area is the BCM2763 VideoCore IV which boasts 1080p video, 20-megapixel images and gigapixel graphics, all running at low power because of the firm’s new 40nm process. The chip can do both 2D and 3D rendering and is ideal for games and can also be used to power TV out to HDTVs.
TV browser designer Oregan Networks, has partnered with UK TV brand Cello to launch a range set tops to bring internet access to existing TVs. The product is called Cello iViewer, and will run the BBC iPlayer plus other free to view web video services. The box is also equipped with DRM allowing delivery of premium content. Entertainment, news and social networking services, such as Twitter, can also be accessed on-screen through an animated carousel, and the entire system is based around CE-HTML and a W3C Widgets engine.
A US survey has confirmed what we all knew intuitively, that the stupid habit of increasing the TV volume when displaying adverts causes viewers to be annoyed, turn the set down, change the channel and think badly of the product that is advertised. The US Congress is in the process of deciding if it should outlaw the process, and insist that commercial audio levels are kept in line with related programming. 1000 viewers in the survey told researcher Harris that 89% of people are annoyed by the practice and that 41% routinely turn the volume down, 22% switch to mute and 17% change channel.