Cablevision has won the bid to buy Bresnan Communications from Providence the US private equity operation. Comcast is understood to hold some shares. The bidding was triggered in March and came to a head last week with as many as 7 bidders, but Cablevision topped the bidding at $1.365 billion. It buys the thirteenth largest cable company in the US, with systems in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Utah which pass 630,000 homes and serve 300,000 basic subscribers. Merrill Lynch and Citi have provided commitments for debt financing for the transaction which will complete in late 2010.
French Quad play operator Bouygues Telecom has used Canadian French company Blustreak Technology’s Machblue Flash platform to put Adobe Flash on embedded devices, to power the new IPTV interface on its existing Bbox set tops. The new UI goes live this month and a future release will include a media center and a Widget Framework for accessing news, sports, weather, traffic, entertainment gossip, stocks, and horoscopes on the TV. Bouygues is apparently now second sourcing Bbox devices from Sagem, as well as the original supplier Thomson, now Technicolor, which it launched in Autumn 2008. The fading fortunes of Technicolor in the set top market may have something to do with that.
UK set top maker Pace said this week that South Africa-based pay TV operator, MultiChoice, has had it develop a second generation HD DVR. Pace also developed its first. MultiChoice has 2.4 million pay TV customers, and has worked with Pace since 2005. Naturally Multichoice would launch a new HD device at the same time as the World Cup is on in its native South Africa.
Germany’s Kabel Deutschland, the largest single cable TV operation in Europe, reported annual revenues up 10% to €1,502 million, including internet and phone sales, up by almost 40%. However the company’s basic cable subscribers fell to 8.73 million from 8.78 million last quarter and 9.01 million a year ago, so TV subs have fallen 58,000 in the last quarter and 278,000 in the year. The company had a net loss of €45.3 million compared to €144.3 million in the previous year, but has cut debt by €154.2 million to €2.8 billion.
Rubberduck Media Lab, a subsidiary of Aspiro AB and one of Europe’s leading providers of streaming mobile TV services, said this week it had upgraded its support for a wide range of touch phones, through an in-house developed Java application. It already supports the iPhone and Android phones through specialist apps and the new Java app is for other brands of phones such as Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. Rubberduck recently announced an HTTP-streaming video architecture.
Singapore communications provider StarHub has deployed an intelligent video platform from SeaChange International to support its mobile TV service. The system is a streaming service and offers users 24 branded premium pay channels on their mobile handsets. The two companies will showcase the platform at BroadcastAsia and CommunicAsia throughout June.
UK femtocell chip maker PicoChip says it has now sold 1 million chips and is on track to achieve 50% sequential revenue growth this calendar quarter. PicoChip now has over 25 femtocell customers including Alcatel-Lucent, GWT, ipAccess, Sagem and Ubiquisys.
Californian encoder specialist Envivio this week said that its equipment forms the basis of a new headend for Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, featuring its 4Caster C4 product range. The installations is for all three screens ‘ TVs, PCs and handsets, and replaces Chunghwa’s existing software-based infrastructure, so that it can support Android smartphones and the Apple iPhone. The headend will deliver both 3GPP and HTTP live streaming video services.
Internet to TV player Boxee this week said it would license the RoxioNow entertainment platform from Sonic Solutions, which it will use in its web TV PC application and its delayed dedicated set-top box which it is designing with D-Link. The RoxioNow platform can already reach a growing list of consumer electronics devices including PCs, connected TVs, set-top DVRs, Blu-ray Disc players and smartphones. There are so many new business in this space it’s hard to remember just where they all fit in, never mind keep track of their survival prospects.
Blackberry builder Research in Motion is testing a touch screen ‘tablet device,’ still in early development, which will connect to the Internet through a tethered BlackBerry according to the Wall Street Journal. The device should be available by the end of this year.
US researcher ABI Research says that global fixed broadband service revenue for Broadband will reach $184 billion by the end of 2010 up from $170 billion at the end of 2009, a rise of 14%. DSL remains the largest broadband revenue generator with 62% of total global broadband service revenue.
Veritape, a small UK start up, claims to have come up with an appliance that helps call centers handle credit card transactions without breaching industry regulations about storing the card numbers. At present the habit of recording conversations also means that credit card numbers are being recorded as touch tones keyed into a phone. This means some 93% of call centers are not compliant with credit card laws. The Veritape product CallGuard automatically turns off the DTMF tones on the phone, so the recording doesn’t catch the card number and fills in the credit card number in an onscreen form, while asterisking out the numbers. It comes as a USB plug in to a PC.
After years of France Telecom being forced to separate out pricing and eliminate cross selling between fixed and cellular services, the local regulator has finally said that it can offer full Quad play pricing for the first time. France Telecom will issue its first quad play offers in August. All of its rivals use quad bundling to get customers, so this may have a substantial effect on the market.
Akamai, the world’s largest content delivery network has acquired Velocitude to take it into the mobile optimization market and extend its CDN capabilities to mobile devices. No price was given for the deal.
The acquisition will add mobile content transformation to Akamai’s existing suite of cloud services so that it can transcode content for each of the different types of phones around the world. Until now many companies support a separate infrastructure for mobile web sites or mobile content, but now Akamai reckons it will be able to support both.
The Hong Kong Telecommunications Authority, Ofta said it had received three bids for a broadcast Mobile TV service which came from China Mobile, City Telecom and Hong Kong Telecommunications reports Telecom Paper. PCCW quite clearly has its own plans and doesn’t want to use China’s CMMB, which is mandated with this license. The winning bidder must use at least 75% of the transmission capacity to deliver mobile TV content and cover at least 50% of Hong Kong’s population within 18 months.