Digital fingerprinting and watermarking specialist Civolution, previously owned by Philips, has signed up BBC Worldwide to its Teletrax broadcast monitoring service. This will monitor playing of BBC shows on overseas TV channels. Fingerprinting generates a reference profile, unique to the video, unlike watermarking which places a code of some sort inside specific copies of a video. Teletrax offers both. Ostensibly BBC says this is to help time the release of DVDs, but it will also ensure unscheduled extra broadcasts do not go out unlicensed.
US cable equipment supplier Arris has received a major Chinese broadcasting honor in Science and Technology from SARFT, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The award was for its cable modem termination system and its ConvergeMedia VoD platform, which must be used more in China that we had previously thought. Arris says they are used in 70 countries. Not sure we thought cable was in that many countries.
Subscribers in China to IPTV are expected to double in 2010, according to iSuppli, which it attributes to a government push to accelerate convergence among the country’s telecommunications, broadcast and Internet operators. IPTV will jump to 8.5 million in 2010, rising by 96% from the 4.4 million in 2009. Eventually by 2014, IPTV subscribers in China will exceed 31 million says the US researcher.
HITS, the Comcast content management business and cable equipment supplier Arris said this week that Cass Cable TV, Mediastream, Margaretville Telephone Company and Plantation Cable have all chosen to use VoD in a Box to deliver Video On Demand, a system jointly offered by HITS and ARRIS.
Swiss set top maker Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) said it has introduced its first consumer product in the UK this week, its i-CAN Easy HD receiver. The device will be available in stores in time for the football World Cup and will enable UK TV viewers to watch the existing Freeview SD and the new Freeview HD programming using DVB-T and DVB-T2 and will also allow access to catch-up TV applications such as iPlayer. It comes with its own HD interface, an 8 day TV program guide, parental controls, and Dolby Digital Plus stereo. Now that the HD Freeview service has been turned on, there will be lots of these devices announced over the coming weeks.
Swiss conditional access firm Nagravision said this week it has a ten-year conditional access system agreement with Cyfrowy Polsat, Poland’s leading satellite DTH platform. Nagra was already the CA partner for Cyfrowy Polsat and this is just a renewal. Cyfrowy Polsat supports 3.2 million subscribers offering 81 Polish language channels, including 9 HD channels.
US researcher Parks Associates says that US interest in Web-on-TV applications is surging with many households making their own connections via PCs and game consoles. From 2008 to 2009, the number of US households using web connected game consoles increased by 64%, and the number connecting a PC to a TV increased by 36%, according to the firm’s latest report Digital Lifestyles: 2010 Outlook.
Major record label EMI is on the verge of collapse and the Wall Street Journal has reported that it has been seeking salvation from its rivals by offering to license its content in the US via one of Universal Music, Sony or Warner Music. The report holds little hope for EMI, which valued this license at around $150 million a year, just enough to stop it from defaulting on loans. A loan default to Citigroup, which helped fund the $3.6 billion buyout by private equity firm Terra Firma, will almost certainly lead to the EMI name and assets being sold off cheap to one of its three rivals or see it broken up and sold off.
Verizon this week addressed the subject of 3D on its FiOS hybrid IPTV network saying that its network can easily handle the 3D signal and that it is committed to having a 3D offering later in 2010 and warning against grandstand claims by the cable operators, who may also exclude Verizon from 3D content which the cablecos themselves produce. AT&T is already known to be testing 3D TV technologies in its labs.