US Telco Verizon added 153,000 net new FiOS TV customers in the US, taking it to 2.9 million, plus a total of 3.4 million using FiOS fiber lines to get broadband. The company said ARPU for the sector was also up. The TV numbers are up by 49% against year ago figures and total broadband and video revenues were $1.7 billion, up 25.5%. The AT&T figures are out tomorrow and we’ll get them to you next week.
The US FCC issued a new order this week that will allows local broadcast TV channels onto new Pay TV services. This should allow satellite and IPTV providers, to get more ‘must have’ programming the FCC said. Previously cable affiliated sports programming could not be shown on these services. The FCC says it is looking at a number of complaints where cable operators have significantly hindered competition by withholding from their rivals terrestrially delivered regional sports networks.
Motorola has complained to the US International Trade Commission over Research In Motion, saying that it infringes on five Motorola patents relating to Wi-Fi access, application management, user interface and power management. The company has asked the ITC to block Blackberry devices from being brought into the country. If it was successful and if both Apple’s and Nokia’s call to block each other’s devices were also successful, there would be hardly any smart phones in the US. Eastman Kodak has a similar call to block BlackBerries over patents for color imaging.
Omnifone and Hewlett-Packard have launched a MusicStation unlimited music service in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, which will work on HP branded PCs. The service will give access to millions of tracks from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music and Warner Music International and leading independent labels and will be distributed on 16 models of PCs, with a 14 day free trial for the service. If consumers take the £9 a month subscription service they can also keep 10 tracks each month forever in DRM free MP3 file format.
AOL has bought StudioNow in the US, an online platform for video creation and distribution for $36.5 million in cash. StudioNow helps users create, edit, syndicate and upload video content for websites, and already has a number of blue chip customers including ClearChannel and Simon and Schuster. AOL hopes the extra capabilities can be integrated into its Seed.com subsidiary which offers services to professional video creators and help it grow the amount of user generated video it holds.
Juniper Networks and Polycom are going to produce a combined HD video conferencing service, with Juniper providing edge routers and service gateways and Polycom the telepresence and video conferencing systems. The service will be ready by mid-year 2010.
Vodafone UK says that it has now sold 100,000 iPhones since making them first available on January 14, in just one week. It is the third operator in the UK to have the iPhone, with O2 having had a long running exclusive deal, and Orange getting it onto its network before Christmas, along with one of its MVNOs, Tesco the supermarket chain. We have often said that in the UK and most of Europe, most people will not move operator to get an iPhone, which if true, means that there is plenty of market left, which is perhaps what we are seeing.
Entropic Communications, the company that currently has the monopoly (apart from recently launched Broadcom chips) on making chips for MoCA (Multimedia Over Co-ax Alliance) said this week it is now taking volume orders from DirecTV, for integration into its set-tops for connecting them for multi-room DVR connections. Initially MoCA was used by Verizon and then taken up by US and European cablecos for multi-room DVR connections.
Independent US Telco SureWest Communications has completed its move to Microsoft Mediaroom and is offering it to customers in its Sacramento, California market. SureWest announced the deal in the Summer and has been a pioneer of HD IPTV as far back as 2005 with a system which used Irdeto for conditional access, Minerva middleware, Kasenna VoD and Amino set tops. It has also upgraded to ADSL2+ connections and moved to Mediaroom.
The lack of an iPhone at Verizon has meant that many of its home FiOS users have had to miss out on all the benefits that iPhones have had on show for controlling pay TV services. Now it has addressed this with an app on the Android Market app store for remotely controlling FiOS TV on an Android phone. Users can download the App for nothing, sync it simply being keying the phone number into the FiOS TV and book VoDs and set DVRs from their phone.
Google has changed the price at which it will acquire On2 Technologies, the codec specialist that offered the first codecs inside the now dominant Adobe Flash Video. This is because the Google share price has gone up considerably while the paperwork was being done. Now each share of On2 will get just 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A Common Stock, plus an additional $0.15 per share in cash. The total value reflects a slight increase in the offer price the company says, and it is its final offer. The deal was originally set in August last year, at around $106 million.
Google this week announced results for the quarter to December with revenue up 17% to $6.67 billion on the quarter. Net income was $1.97 billion, compared to $382 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. Google absorbed write downs on both AOL and Clearwire investments. Sites owned by Google generated revenues of $4.42 billion, some 66% of the total, with $3.52 billion of revenue coming from outside the US.
The US International Trade Commission has come out and confirmed that it is investigating the patent infringement complaint against Apple brought by Nokia in December. It has not yet said back to Apple that it is investigating its complaint against Nokia, and it may not. The ITC wants to complete its investigation within 45 days.
Netherlands based Telco KPN said in its results this week that it now has almost 1 million TV customers. It intimated that this was down to growth in IPTV which has now gone to about 90,000 connected homes. However the bulk of its TV customers are from its broadcast Digitenne DVB-T platform, which has 880,000 customers. That suggests that the rest are DVB-H mobile TV customers, around 30,000 or so.
Web site Ars Technica is reporting that Google’s lead engineer for the Chrome Operating System reckons that it will shortly have a media player to go head to head with Microsoft’s player, integrated into the browser based OS. The Google Chrome Operating System is not expected to appear on netbooks until the end of 2010. We wonder what data formats it will play? Or are we set for a new one?
UK embedded browser company ANT says that CreNova Technology, a two year old set top maker in Germany, will build its new range of hybrid set-top boxes using the ANT Galio HbbTV Platform. Remember HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) will allow broadband VoD and DVB-T broadcasts to come together on a set top in a standard way, rather like the UK’s Canvas Project.
UK researcher Futuresource Consulting says that Movie-on-Demand revenues will reach €430 million ($604 million) in Western Europe and $2.4 billion in the USA by 2013. Video on Demand (VoD) delivered straight to the TV is generating high levels of consumer interest, but little revenue, with free content accounting for more than 95% of the material being watched. But the new reports shows that consumers will pay extra for movies.
This month’s IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) Digital Music Report shows that digital music revenues reached $4.2 billion, up 12% in 2009, with some 400 online services licensed worldwide. Over 25% of all music is now digital and online. IFPI reckons that illegal file-sharing and other forms of online piracy are still eroding investment in local music markets, especially in Spain, France and Brazil. This year many music companies partnered with advertising supported services such as Spotify, Deezer, MySpace Music and We7. Single track download sales increased 10%, digital albums we up 20%.