There is more detail on the emerging BlackPad this week, with RIM supposedly going to Taiwanese notebook maker Quanta for the device with plans to ship 2 million units in 2010 and 8 million in 2011. It has a 9.7 inch screen, from Hon Hai, a front and rear facing camera, WiFi and 3G, BlackBerry 6.0 and priced around $500 powered by a 1GHz ARM based Marvell Processor. That 10 million unit estimate could be a little on the optimistic side unless RIM has something really special planned. November is expected for the release.
US cable equipment supplier BigBand Networks came out with second quarter results with revenues of $26.4 million, down dramatically from the $39.0 million in 2009 yielding a second quarter net loss of $9.6 compared to a net income of $3.1 million. The shortfall is caused by two things, the reliance on a handful of major US companies for its revenue, with Verizon orders falling away while Time Warner Cable continued to order at its historical rate. But also because it has pledged its future to Switched Digital Video platforms using IP over cable infrastructure, and it has had some delays in customers going ahead with that transition. BigBand said that its SDV footprint moved to 37 million .
US cableco Cablevision reported second quarter revenues of $1.8 billion up 5.8%, with operating income up 23% to $417 million. It reported an addition of 75,900 RGUs and said this included an increase in basic video customers. ARPU rose to $149 and cable advertising was up 26.7% and the company generated free cash flow of $432 million.
Recent mobile TV radio IPO MaxLinear cannot seem to stop scoring design wins and notched up another 3 set top wins in Brazil and Argentina with its MxL135RF silicon tuner. Remember both these countries have opted for ISDB-T, MaxLinear’s specialism, with a 70% market share in Japan where the protocol originated. The deals were done through Skyworth, a Hong Kong-based TV builder. These are the first wins for MaxLinear in Latin America, where ISDB-T has been chosen by Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Bolivia leading to 107 million homes needed TV sets with ISDB-T chips in them by 2015.
We keep hearing about this ‘huge’ market for Pico projectors, which project video images from handsets or other portable devices. No-one has answered the question ‘ ‘Why do you need a Pico projector when you have an iPad?’ yet so we’re not so sure it’s a market that will happen. Anyway, this week In-Stat says that mobile phones will capture 90% of this market, which will involve 20 million devices by 2014. Faultline reckons that this is the market that everyone has got wrong.
US cable equipment supplier Arris said this week it has supplied Trinity Communications, a cable operator based in South Pittsburgh, with an Arris FTTMax RF over Glass (RFoG) all fiber network in Marion and Sequatchie County. It will use this network for digital voice, video and high-speed data triple play service. The network needed transmitters, Optical Network Units and repeaters and DOCSIS cable modems. When completed, the deployment will offer triple play services to 3,000 homes.
Norwegian conditional access specialist Conax this week said it was heading for Latin America (see earlier article) and will offer what it calls ‘enhanced support services’ there through a regional support center for pay TV operators using satellite, cable, MMDS and DTT.
US researcher In-Stat says that hybrid web-to-TV set top boxes will becomes a $ 1.3 billion worldwide by 2014. Now that is just plain obvious if you are reading Faultline every week. It reckons that digital terrestrial boxes will be the hybrid-box growth leader, with a CAGR of 42% between 2010 and 2014 and that Western Europe will be the hot bed for development of hybrid services, and the early leader for shipments. It also says that the Intel x86 instruction set is the key enabler with Adobe Flash, Windows Media, Microsoft Silverlight, DiVX, and VP8 appear all appearing on it first.
Skype will go public and raise $100 million for development and says that sales in the first half of the year were $406 million and it made net income of $13 million.
Swiss set top maker Advanced Digital Broadcast, said this week that Indonesia’s First Media will use its products in a HD pay-TV service which is about to launch. This is ADB’s first deal in what is the 4th most populous country in the world, with a 245 million population. The set top uses MHP for interactivity
Blockbuster this week made a big fuss about including games in its By Mail offering. We’re shocked it has taken it so long. The introduction of game rentals in stores helped Blockbuster numbers immeasurably about three years ago, so the idea of renting them like Netflix rents movies was always going to be popular. Customers will have access to 3,000 titles for Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2 and Wii.
Israeli mobile TV chip leader Siano Mobile Silicon has opened offices in Brazil, where it says that there have been 1 million handsets sold for 1 seg mobile TV. The newly established operations will be headed by Pompilio Roselli, telecoms veteran who will run the entire Latin America region which has opted ‘en masse’ for ISDB-T, the technology used in Japan for digital TV and mobile TV. Siano also added a new receiver chip adapted to the region’s ISDB-T variation called the SMS2130.
MaxLinear also said this week that it is collaborating on a set top with 3view to build a HD set-top DVR, hybrid between IPTV and DVB-T2. It will come with a 500GB hard drive, and dual DVB-T2 tuners and broadband connectivity. It is aimed at the UK market and includes an integrated Sky Player and BBC iPlayer for catch up TV over the internet.
An Italian judge has said that Fastweb founder Silvio Scaglia will have to stand trial over a conspiracy to launder money to avoid tax. This case emerged last year over dealings in which happened a few years back in Italy, and Scaglia has insisted that he knows nothing about the transactions. Prosecutors reckon that about €2 billion was recorded in fakes sales at Fastweb and Telecom Italia and doesn’t accept that senior executives could not have known about it.
France Telecom, which is now allowed by its regulator to offer quad play bundled, has launched them under the name Orange Open. Fixed and mobile telephony, broadband and TV will appear all on a single bill with a unified customer service number. That help center consolidation must have cost it a bit. The packages start at €39.90 per month in line with rival prices in France.
US mobile TV pioneer MobiTV says that it has sampled the TV viewing on a number of different sized phones and concluded that the larger the phone, the more video viewing the user undertakes. The tests were carried out during the FIFA World Cup as MobiTV delivered about 100 million minutes of coverage from ESPN Mobile TV. Apparently phones with a 5 inch screen watched 118.2 average minutes of soccer, and at the other end of the spectrum those with a 2 inch screen watched 61.1 minutes. MobiTV said that Gadget Geeks were the most likely to watch more minutes per day