Freesat says it has passed the 1 million mark in terms of customer homes in the UK, and has taken 400,000 of them from pay TV service BSkyB. That can’t come as too much of a surprise because Sky is marketing the service and Sky customers already have much of the equipment needed (satellite dish) to take the service. The UK free to air satellite service is the fastest growing TV service in Europe right now. Freesat is hoping to take advantage of pressure on Sky to offer unbundled live sports to rival services and says if that happens it will offer paid sport, alongside free content.
Israeli and UK based conditional access supplier NDS says that Yes, the only DTH TV supplier in Israel, has launched a VoD based on its Progressive Download technology, which NDS designed for hybrid satellite IP DVRs. Yes subscribers can download movies over the open internet to watch immediately or view later and it is offering 5,000 VoD titles. NDS says there is no buffering delay on the new technology, which suggests that popular titles have a buffered amount pre-downloaded in the background.
US IPTV DRM specialist Verimatrix said this week that WIST, one of the longest established telcos in Poland, has deployed Its VCAS DRM system on its IPTV service in the Rzeszow region. Verimatrix worked with local partner Vector, and VCAS will secure 80 MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 channels, VoD services and catch up content from a network PVR, across an ADSL2+ network. It is using BeeSMART middleware, customized by Vector and the 1910 series of set-top boxes from Motorola.
Amino Communications, the UK set top maker won one of the IPTV World Forum awards this week for its new hybrid/OTT Amino Freedom media centre. The company picked up ‘Best Consumer Device’ at the awards in London, for a device which uses the Intel Atom CE4100. The Freedom can deliver broadcast content, internet content, local content and give access to social networking sites, the company says.
SES Astra says that more people in Europe are watching direct to home satellite TV than cable, with satellite claiming 77 million versus cable’s 71 million. This should not come as too much of a surprise, satellite TV is clearly growing, while cable has been shrinking in Europe for some time.
The total reach of the SES Astra satellite is now 125 million homes across Europe, which it says is 3 million up from the previous year. Of these, 57 million are direct to home and 68 million via cable. Astra said it now reaches 51% of all 244 million TV homes in Europe.
UK set top maker Pace has also quietly sneaked out with a Microsoft Mediaroom compliant set top this week at the IPTV World Forum in London. Pace developed the first set top released for the BT Vision service in the UK which uses Mediaroom, and the new, as yet unnamed, device will be aimed at operators wishing to launch IPTV, hybrid broadcast broadband or pure Over The Top (OTT) services. Pace has just finished having the new set top tested by Microsoft testing partner S3.
Sprint Nextel unveiled a new ad explaining how iPhone users can connect to Clearwire’s mobile WiMAX network using its Overdrive mobile hotspot device. Sprint unveiled the Overdrive, built by Sierra Wireless, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and has been talking up its benefits ever since. The device connects to Clearwire’s WiMAX and broadcasts a WiFi hotspot for up to five devices offering between 3 and 6 Mbps.
Taiwanese mobile phone maker HTC responded this week to Apple’s claims of patent infringement saying it disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC is the phone company that has produced devices most similar to the iPhone. This is the second action that Apple has taken, responding to a suit filed by Nokia by making similar counter claims.
AT&T has thrown what looks like a lifeline to drowning Palm, the US smartphone maker, saying it will carry the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus. But this is really just one of a many new phones for AT&T and much of its advertising thrust will continue to be vested in the iPhone for some time to come. Palm may improve its figures slightly, but analysts seeing how few of these devices have shipped to end users will continue to hammer its share price, which fell 30% on news that although it beat its numbers for its third quarter, its smartphone sell-through rates were low with only 408,000 devices sold to end users out of 960,000 shipped.
Widevine announced that its video optimization and DRM will be included in Metrological’s Metroconnect OS which offers adaptive streaming for over-the-top video content delivery as well as conventional TV viewing.
Online games and app store specialist Accedo and French IPTV set top maker Netgem announced at IPTV World Forum that Accedo’s IPTV applications will be made available on Netgem’s IPTV platform. The two companies will introduce a range of customized IPTV applications over the next 12 months they said, which for the most part we took to be enabling games.
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the two founders who got rich from the invention of Skype, say they have raised $165 million for a new VC fund, the second offered by their investment firm Atomico Ventures, to invest in start ups. They are looking for another Google, Skype, or Facebook they say.
Kabel Deutschland Group, the largest cable operator in Europe, has completed its IPO, raising just €760 million, a little less than it had hoped for, as the shares got away at the bottom end of their announced range. The company sold 34.5 million shares at €22, which values KDG at around $5 billion. It’s one thing for largest shareholder Providence Equity Partners to claim that this gives it a $3 billion profit, and quite another for it to sell sufficient shares to take any of that profit. The Providence holding has now dropped from 88% to around 66% and it is likely to be a major shareholder for some time to come.
Swedish VoD player Edgeware, said this week that Comstar-UTS, the Russian Telco, has deployed Edgeware’s Flash memory based VoD servers to offer Time-shift services in Russia. Comstar will offer Pause Live-TV to 133 000 IPTV subscribers in Moscow. Edgeware also said that Danish operator, Smile Content, has also deployed its system to offer a new Catch-Up and Restart-TV service.
Pace Networks said this week it has signed Space Television Group as a systems integration partner in South Africa for the rollout of the MultiDweller platform. Space TV works closely with the nation’s payTV operators, including MultiChoice, and will use MultiDweller to deliver digital services to coaxial-enabled communities in South Africa, and as an IPTV solution for other countries across the continent.
According to Advanced TV News Telenor has launched IPTV services to its 623,000 broadband customers in Norway creating a full triple play to fiber customers. The system has just completed a pilot with HD, thousands of VoD titles and a basic 12-channel package at €22.30 per month.
The national newspapers have taken the Google China debacle on as a major front pages ‘slow day’ piece, and this week Google announced a decision to stop censoring the results on its search engine, and moved the processing out of China to Hong Kong. The fallout will be that almost no-one in China will want to incur government wrath doing business with Google. Already the Chinese government has begun blocking access to unfiltered results on Google’s new site however it might just increase Google’s fairly low market share there.
Activist investor Carl Icahn, has bid for the remaining shares in US film studio Lionsgate which he doesn’t hold, offering $6 a share. He claims that management has let shareholders down, but it looks like he is simply upset that he bought 30% of the company and the share price just hasn’t moved. He is looking to raise his holding to 50.1% and then change the management. He is openly criticizing bids to buy old film libraries from MGM and Miramax, but quite recently considered funding these bids. Icahn has fought to change boards and strategy at Yahoo and Blockbuster, in the past, to name but a few.