Zoran said that its new highly integrated Coach SOC 12P digital camera processors are shipping in volume to tier-one digital video camera brands, many are on show at Photokina in Germany this week. The Zoran Coach 12p offers Digital Video Stabilization to suppress handshake jitter, which cuts out the need to include motion sensors or gyros in the design. It also offers low-light sensitivity, color handling, face detection and object tracking.
Apple has gone a long way in recent weeks to placate organizations that were pursuing it in the law courts, and the European Union has duly dropped antitrust actions following the vendor’s relaxation of its developer and warranty policies. But some opponents are less easy to assuage, and the Apple-Nokia feud over patents and business practises is turning into the new version of the old Nokia-Qualcomm soap opera. Apple has expanded its legal action against the Finnish giant, launching lawsuits in the UK that mirror those already in the US courts (along with various countersuits from Nokia). Other legal actions in the US are on hold, pending resolutions of their claims in front of the International Trade Commission. Both claim that the other is infringing on its patents.
We were unsurprised to hear that LightSquared, the Harbinger Capital-owned startup which wants to build a hybrid cellular satellite LTE network in the US will use Qualcomm chips. In the past Qualcomm is the only chip maker which has been keen to support such hybrids. It will produce dual mode silicon that will talk to both satellites and to terrestrial base stations.
US researcher In-Stat says that hybrid set tops in four categories are all the rage, those with internet connections and any of cable TV, satellite TV, IPTV and digital terrestrial TV, and Europe is the hotbed of much of this activity. Well it’s obviously the hotbed of the digital terrestrial hybrids, because free to air digital terrestrial broadcasting is most common there. This may be exceptionally old news to readers of Faultline, but In-Stat has a forecast for each category and says there will be over 70 suppliers. You could have found that out just walking the aisles of IBC two weeks ago.
Juniper Research says that revenues from mobile content and applications in North America alone will reach $10 billion by 2015 up from $4 billion in 2009 as mobile users in the region continue to migrate to smartphones.
US advertising specialist BlackArrow said this week that its Advanced Advertising System has been selected by Rainbow Media Holdings for a trial of dynamic VoD advertising, which has already started. Rainbow Media owns AMC, IFC, Sundance Channel, WE TV and Wedding Central and will look at new ways to leverage popular VoD content through multiple distribution partners with dynamic, addressable VoD advertising.
Sony says that it will major on its TransferJet wireless technology, a method for sending bulk data files between devices which are just a few centimeters apart, at the CEATEC Japan conference starting October 5th. The short range wireless technology has been announced about two years ago and will now be shown transferring photos between cameras, sending photos to printers, storing content on network servers, and displaying pictures on TVs and picture frames. Sony will also show future concepts, such as content downloading from kiosks as well as new application proposals incorporating mobile phones, PCs and set tops.
Dolby Laboratories said this week that it will develop a licensing program in China and is working with Nationalchip there to offer chip designs which support Dolby Digital Plus. Dolby Digital Plus is an audio coding system which delivers 7.1 channels of surround sound, in a wide range of bit rates.
Microtune, the radio tuner supplier which has just been bought by Zoran said that it has now shipped 7.5 Million wideband tuners for use in DOCSIS and EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based devices, mostly with the Microtune MT2170 wideband tuner and the MT1570 wideband amplifier.
Set top chip expert Sigma Designs has announced that its SMP8653 secure media processor is powering Netgear’s Push2TV adapter to display content from Intel Wireless Display notebook PCs onto big screen HDTVs, wirelessly. Already 40 laptops are available with Intel Wireless Display which captures fully rendered display frames and wirelessly sends the compressed video and audio wirelessly to the adapter which is connected to the TV. Sigma says it is the only company with a chip to do this so far.
Canadian IPTV specialist Espial announced the availability this week of Espial Mediabase 9.1 a new version of the flagship VoD platform it acquired when it bought Kasenna. MediaBase 9.1 is aimed at both IPTV and cable operators and has improved video quality, and far more storage capacity using commercial off the shelf drives from HP. MediaBase uses bandwidth reservation though the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) which allows a VOD session to reserve end-to-end network resources and bandwidth for Quality of Service (QoS), and Espial says it is the first to offer this feature.
Turns out that the Star Wars saga is not finished making director George Lucas money. The Phantom Menace will now come out in 3D during 2012. It’s a long manual grind changing a 2D version to 3D, but for Lucas it will be worth it, and it might look okay too.