New Media Digital Contents, a provider of on demand content in Portugal, says it has formed a strategic partnership with Tvinci, the Israeli Pay-TV VoD platform provider. They will work together to create a white box subscription and pay as you go VoD service for operators in EMEA and Latin America called FilmBox, which will be rolled out the first quarter of 2011.
LightSquared said this week that it has closed another round of funding worth $850 million in debt towards building an LTE network in the US, and added that this is a first round of a syndicated credit facility arranged by UBS and last for four years. This brings payments to LightSquared of over $ 2 billion in equity and debt. LightSquared also said it has already signed its first wholesale agreements but did not say who with and is in advanced negotiations with further customers.
The French Telecoms regulator Arcep has published ten proposals which are designed to bring about network neutrality, after a year of drafting ideas and more than 50 pubic hearings. The proposals relate to quality of internet access, a lack of discrimination between different data streams, supervision being in place when internet traffic shaping is used and increased transparency to end users of what broadband offers are. It now has the basis to formulate some new Arcep regulations.
MobiTV is spreading its wings and aims to extended its mobile TV streaming service to PCs and TVs from handsets. The current $10 monthly subscription fee will allow you to begin watching video on your smart phone and then pause and switch to viewing from the living room. This starts with live sports and will be slowly extended to other content types. MobiTV also partners with cellcos, such as Sprint and Verizon Wireless, and hopes other providers, like cablecos and ISPs, will now want to bundle its services.
Netflix has signed a distribution deal with Sony which delays its access to movie DVDs until 28 days after they go on sale, in exchange for lower fees and more rights to stream movies. The 28 day window was thought up to stop rentals hurting DVD sales and hurts $1 a day DVD Red Box kiosk business more than it hurts Netflix, in our view. Netflix has already cut such deals with Warner Brothers, Universal and 20th Century Fox.