It turns out that OnLive has cut more than one international deal, and it follows up its distribution deal with British Telecom in the UK with another a week later at Belgacom in Belgium. The terms are the same, these two players have an exclusive on selling a broadband line and the OnLive gaming subscription in a bundle, other existing broadband customers will be able to go to OnLive to buy direct. Like BT, Belgacom has taken a 2.6% stakes in the US pioneer of hosted gaming.
AT&T has added some new quad play bundles this week with AT&T U-verse TV, U-verse High Speed Internet, U-verse Voice, as well as wireless services. The new deal offers monthly savings of $15 over a U-verse Choice triple-play bundle and is around $60 a month cheaper than buying the four services separately. The new deal starts at $172 a month including 300 mobile minutes and goes to $192 for 450 mobile minutes plus the other three services.
US transmitter specialist Harris has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CapRock Communications, a provider of managed satellite communications solutions for the energy, government and maritime industries. Under the terms of the agreement, Harris will pay $525 million in cash, subject to post-closing adjustments. CapRock had revenues of $359 million in 2009 and EBITDA of $54 million.
US encoder builder Harmonic this week said that Shenzhen Topway Video, one of China’s leading cable operators, has expanded its HDTV and VoD services with an Harmonic headend and edgeQAM. With this new deployment, Shenzhen Topway Video Communication retains its leadership position in the region by delivering 13 channels of high quality HDTV programming, and offering new HD VoD services and enhanced on-demand capabilities, such as time-shifted TV, to its one million subscribers.
That other, rather smaller, US encoder player Envivio said this week it had provided Portugal Telecom with its Three Screens delivery platform to support the commercial rollout of MEO@PC, a television service for delivery to PCs. The service relies on Envivio’s 4Caster C4 encoders configured to deliver content via Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming and Silverlight, protected with PlayReady DRM.
Multichannel news says that Comcast was handed a list of information requirements that it has to supply to the FCC this week in support of its bid to merge its content assets with NBC Universal. Comcast was asked about its online video delivery plans including whether or not it planned to provide its programming to video distributors such as like Boxee, Hulu, and iTunes. The FCC is also said to have asked for details on its TV Everywhere, FanCast Xfinity, as well as In Demand, and its web platform, thePlatform. Just how Comcast goes about managing its web traffic is also said to have come up, naturally chasing down its precise position vis-‘-vis network neutrality.
The part of Ericsson that was previously known as Tandberg TV which sells real time video encoding platforms, has won a deal in Australia to help Nine Network Australia to add 3D sports content in the form of the ‘The Harvey Norman State of Origin Series,’ of Rugby League games.
According to IPTV News Spanish telco Jazztel has dropped its IPTV service Jazztelia, after months of internal debate. It will stop new sales to customers but support existing subscribers until it works out what to do with them. It plans to resell pay TV subscriptions to Digital+ instead and may launch an over-the-top TV service. Jazztel only got 11,000 customers in four years and was dramatically lagging rivals such as Telefonica which has 733,000 customers.
Google has Apple to thank for convincing authorities that its purchase of AdMob should be given the go ahead. The US Federal Trade Commission said Apple’s announcement in April that it would launch its own, competing ad network ‘overshadowed’ the FTC’s original anti-trust concerns.
The Diffusion Group has argued in a report that by 2020, Internet video consumption will outstrip broadcast TV viewing. This change of scene will come about because of devices which take internet video to the TV, the company says. Well that’s definitely happening and it won’t be stopped, but our own view is that it depends upon how quickly traditional broadcasters embrace OTT, or if in the US they try to fight it. TDG calculates that the average time spent watching online video across the entire TV-viewing population increased 84% in 2009 while they say TV view was relatively flat. Web video viewing will accelerate as the assets move to the TV screen even as overall video viewing from all sources stays relatively constant at 32 hours a week.
June 7 is now a near-certainty to be the launch date for the latest iPhone, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicking off the firm’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference on that day (and with US retailer Wal-Mart halving the prices of the current iPhone 3GS in readiness). That would suggest that the new handset would hit the shelves in early July. The pattern is a familiar one, since the original iPhone launch in June 2007, but the big difference is that Google is now Apple’s avowed enemy, not a close ally.
In the UK, German Broadcaster RTL has formed a team to put Channel Five on the block says UK newspaper The Telegraph. It announced €10 million losses earlier this year against a €2 million profit the year before and RTL said that the UK market had more consolidating to go through. Advertising sales were hit hard by the recession says RTL.
We have previously talked about Steve Jobs not being happy until Apple is worth more than Microsoft, well the New York Times said it happened for the first time earlier this week when Apple reach a market capitalization of $227.1 billion, overtaking Microsoft’s $226.3 billion valuation. We looked and it’s still ahead of Microsoft, by just about $1 billion. Somehow we don’t think Jobs is going to retire yet though.