US DVD retailer and rental group Blockbuster said in a filing this week that it might be forced into bankruptcy if it could not reschedule its debt load. The company has fought a 5 year long rearguard action against new technologies, including the Netflix online DVD rental idea and DVD vending machines. It has complained of ‘significant liquidity constraints,’ and said it was likely to have to dilute shareholders by converting debt. It share price immediately plummeted by 30%.
Motorola figures show this week that co-CEO Sanjay Jha has been paid $3.8 million in annual pay made up of a salary of $905k, a bonus of $1.2 million and stock worth $1.3 million. Jha had a huge signing on fee of $100 million and last year, as nothing but trouble hit the company, agreed to forego his bonus. If Jha turns the mobile handset maker around, he will be worth every penny to shareholders, although the 11,000 people laid off by Motorola may not think so.
Apple is charging a full $99 to replace faulty iPad batteries it seems, plus the cost of doing the work. According to Apple’s Web site, iPads which require service due to ‘a battery’s diminished ability to hold an electrical charge’ will be replaced for a service fee of $99 plus $6.95. Apple also warns that you must sync your iPad before you return it, because the hard drive is either wiped, or the guts of the device replaced and all data is lost.
The Orchard, a digital distributor of music and video, said this week it has agreed to merge with parent company Dimensional Associates, in a $13 million deal that will take the company private once again. Dimensional owned The Orchard until 2007 and then did a reverse takeover of Digital Music Group to acquire its public listing. Dimensional currently holds 42% of The Orchard’s shares and has bid $2.05 each for the rest.
Yahoo is expected this week to acquire Citizen Sports, a developer of sports apps and games for the iPhone and for Facebook, says All Things Digital, citing unnamed sources. The deal is supposed to be worth $50 million.
Not for the first time, Facebook traffic was ahead of Google’s traffic in the US last week, making it the most visited website, according to audience measurement firm Hitwise. Does this mean that we are searching less and less and socializing more? It’s not quite that simple, because search continues to rise as an activity, just not as fast as the page after page of social links we follow. However it will drive Facebook to being a serious power broker on phones and partner sites, as well as on technology, going forwards.
Qualcomm has said it will bid for Broadband Wireless Access spectrum in India in the 2.3 GHz band. It says it will build out using TD-LTE which will enable seamless broadband with both 3G WCDMA/HSPA and EV-DO. Qualcomm has often decided to buy spectrum and build a network in order to prove its technology, and it said it will bid with unspecified partners.
Telefonica in Spain is offering a new cheap version of its Imagenio IPTV service in its Flexible package, which costs just €10 a month for 16 basic channels, including regional news and satellite channels, 14 digital terrestrial channels and the VOD service Videoclub. Telefonica says it has over 700,000 subscribers to the service
Romania’s incumbent telco Romtelecom says it will now launch a VOD service by the end of 2010. Romtelecom has been offering a pay DTH satellite TV service called Dolce, for years, and last year added an interactive element over DSL, so VoD was the obvious next step.
BT will offer its BT Vision hybrid IPTV, in bundles for the first time, along with fixed line voice and high speed internet. It was previously prevented from doing this by pricing regulations, but late last year agreed with regulator Ofcom to new pricing arrangements which make triple play bundles possible. It will offer unlimited calls, internet up to 20Mbps and its Vision Gold Value IPTV service for £49 ($75) a month and offer a cut price introductory offer for the first three months.
Samsung this week said in reports in its native Korea that it would launch a rival to the Apple iPad this Summer, based on the Intel Atom chipset and running Windows. Perhaps it will even be able to download apps from its Bada smartphone App Store. Samsung has had tablets in the past, notably the Q1 MID, but this is basically a PC shrunk to fit the form factor. No price or exact configuration yet.
People have been waiting for Channel Five in the UK to say when it will take up a slot for HD delivery on the DVB-T2 Freeview multiplex starting this year, and instead Channel Five has opted to deploy HD on the BSkyB DTH satellite platform. The snub to Freeview could certainly be damaging to the new HD multiplex which uses DVB-T2 and will now have a spare slot to fill. Sky has 42 HD channels now and this decision is thought to be down to price, given that Channel Five is not doing so well financially.
UK researcher Ovum has put out a report which says that Telcos are still having to slash and burn costs going forwards if they are going to continue to do well, saying that although the recession in over, there are still the issues of market saturation, increased competition and regulatory intervention on roaming and termination rates. This will lead to lower and lower capex spend over the next two years, which in turn will hit the major telecommunications suppliers and their financial performance.
ComScore figures just released show that both Microsoft and Palm operating systems on smartphones in the US are losing market share to devices based on Google’s Android with Microsoft down 4% points in January, and Palm off 2.1% with almost all of that being taken up by Android devices at 7.1%. ComScore also reported that mobile data usage grew across all categories.
Apple is reported as selling around 120,000 iPads in its first 24 hours of pre-order availability, said a report in Investor Village, which also showed a slight preference, among consumers, for the least-expensive 16 GB model.
Optimus Clix, the mass market brand of Sonaecom, a telco in Portugal, is the first TV operator to deploy the personalized recommendations system from Israeli IPTV middleware supplier Orca. Optimus will use the Orca Compass system across both linear and VoD channels. Orca is now a subsidiary of France Telecom’s Viaccess conditional access provider.