How many times are we going to see the headline, ‘Apple to offer TV shows for 99 cent rental?’ The first time was about three years ago. Yes we agree that Apple will be doing something here, and yes we can see that 99 cents is probably the right price to bring a program to market if you cannot bring entire TV channels, but it has leaked more times than we can remember. This time it comes from Bloomberg. What was it a slow day on the markets? The thrust of this leak is that Apple was talking about entire TV channels in a service for $30 a month, and now it is talking about 99 cents per program. But both have been leaked many times, so tell us something new. That would mean that you would get just an hour a day for $30 ‘ hardly a cable killer at that price, and there’s no way Apple would come to market with something that limp without dressing it up in some way.
Minvera, the US IPTV middleware company, says that it now has over 200 IPTV deployments of its iTVManager software (it wasn’t that long ago that it was approaching its first 100). The company says it has had recent wins at Craw-Kan Telephone Cooperative and Swiftel Communications in North America, ICE in Costa Rica, PCCTV in Cambodia, and Palm Hills Development in the Middle East.
Google has acquired comparison shopping site Like.com, in a deal rated at around $100 million. Like was founded in 2006 and has raised $50 million in financing and offers an image search engine which can identify a product and allow users to search for similar items across the Web, for purposes of comparing prices. It claims to be the first company to bring visual search to shopping. The technology is likely to be added to the Google search engine.
Swedish cellco Teracom has agreed to use the T-VIPS CP560 DVB-T2 Gateway and its CP541 TS Seamless Monitoring Switch. The idea is to use them to deliver HD video over the internet to Swedish homes as well as pick up DVB-T2 broadcasts. It will use its current DVB-T head end for the content. The CP541 switch will take care of monitoring and switching within the Teracom access network, to ensure uninterrupted service.
Along with everyone else on their way to Brazil to benefit from the explosion in digital TV there using Japan’s ISDB-T technology, Harris, the US broadcasting specialist said it will make low power and mid range UHF TV transmitters in a new factory there. It will be located in Campinas, 80 miles northwest of Sao Paulo, and produce the Harris Maxiva UAX air-cooled solid-state transmitters for distribution to broadcasters across Brazil and other Latin American countries. To date, Harris says, only 120 channels out of the approximately 10,000 television licenses in Brazil have made the transition from analog to digital.
Surprise, surprise, but Kudelski seems to be turning around OpenTV far faster than it ever expected. However not faster that we expected at Faultline. The Swiss company used the lack of investment spend at OpenTV to put pressure on its remaining US investors so they would sell out at a massively low price. The deal was completed at the end of last year and already the ‘investment’ it has put in, which as far as we can see came from its own reserves, has already paid off. It has added 100 staff to the OpenTV team. The ramp-up is mostly R&D and is ahead of plan, resulting in a cost base higher than originally planned, but also in a faster than originally planned availability of upgraded products, giving OpenTV a far bigger pipeline of business. The rest of Kudelski results were also up across the board.
US researcher In-Stat says that the cable set top box market grew in 2009, setting a record for global unit shipments, but said that growth has since slowed and 2010 is on track to be the first year of negative growth (shrinkage) since 2002. Despite the overall market slow-down, some regions are poised for growth with Europe demanding HD upgrades and Latin America shifting from analog cable TV to digital cable. ‘Even in a soft year, the cable set top box market continues to offer solid growth opportunities for cable set top box manufacturers,’ says Mike Paxton, Principal Analyst. Shipments are expected to decrease to 44.1 million in 2010, down 8%.
US encoder specialist Harmonic introduced its new EdgeQAM, for modulating cable loops, named as the Ultra-Dense NSG HectoQAM and it says that it can cope with 648 QAMs (separate cable modulations) in just 2 rack units. The density is achieved with blade QAM servers and Harmonic says it offers virtualization and frequency agility. It supports VOD, broadcast, switched digital video, CMTS at DOCSIS 3.0 and cable IPTV services. In short, it can do the works cable-wise. Customer shipments start in September.
French interactive broadcast specialist Httv has launched a new DSM-CC Object Carousel called Primestream, effectively a DVB data streamer and real-time multiplexer which supports interactivity as well as supporting the HbbTV OTT standard recently approved by the European standards agency ETSI. TDF, the French broadcast transmission operator, is the first customer of the PrimeStream system.
Netherlands based conditional access specialist Irdeto said this week that Norwegian cable operator GET has implemented its customer care and billing system for Pay TV. The idea is to allow it to deliver a tailored triple play service to each customer across VoIP, data and video services and to streamline workflows. GET has 410,000 subscribers and migrated all of them to the new system in May.
Sony told the NewYork Times this week that it would begin to offer Crackle content over the PlayStation Network. Crackle is one of the few video sharing sites that has commissioned its own work, ordering Web shows which cost up to $1 million to make. Now as OTT takes off it is trying to find a new route to have these viewed on a TV set, and the PlayStation network seems to be a strong first step. Crackle content is aimed at males 18 to 34, more or less the same demographic as those who love video games.