Virgin Media in the UK gave away a few more details of the Cisco built TiVo box, due out later this quarter, saying that it will be 3D capable and offer 1TB of personal storage, around 500 hours of HD . So far it is being pitched purely as available on a Virgin broadband cable, something that it says it will break out of in the long run, and that the box will come with its own dedicated internal modem. It will, of course run TV apps. When attached to Virgin’s On Demand system it will give access to some 4,600 hours of TV shows, movies and music videos.
French CE manufacturer Technicolor has announced a deal with Telefonica O2 UK to provide it with the Technicolor TG587nv2 broadband advanced service gateway. This is an 802.11n wireless enabled home gateway, which it says will lead to bandwidth intensive services like video streaming and media sharing. So does that mean that O2 plans to sell an OTT service in the UK? It is not saying yet, but we expect so. What it DOES say is that this is designed to cater for smartphones, tablets and other media-rich, wireless devices in the home.
Nielsen gave its third quarter results this week with revenues up 5% to $1,289 million, If it had not been for currency fluctuations it would have been 7% the company said. Operating income was $201 million compared to an operating loss of $326 million for the three months ended September 30, 2009, when there was an impairment of $533 million. So the TV audience measurement business is still worth a fortune, even in these tough times.
In-Stat has a report out on Mobile TV tuner markets and has a report out that says they will exceed $400 million by 2014. This doesn’t means it has completely drunk the Kool Aid from Telegent, a US chip maker which claims to have shipped 90 million analog mobile TV such devices, because although it cites analog advances in China and Latin America (we’re not so sure) it also says that digital mobile TV services are ramping up throughout Asia, as well as Latin America. It also mentions the ATSC mobile DTV services which are launching in the US. So despite writing reports saying that Mobile TV is NOT happening, now it seems to believe that it IS.
Ireland based conditional access firm Latens and US video head end specialist GoBackTV have announced they are partnering on a joint solution to deliver IPTV over Cable for small- to medium-sized cable operators in North America and say that increased competition from satellite and telco providers is forcing cable operators to introduce new IPTV services.
US spending on digital home video entertainment accounted for 13.5% of all home entertainment spending so far this year according to a report from the Digital Entertainment Group. Total consumer spending on all home entertainment ‘ DVD, Blu-ray and digital ‘ reached $12.6 billion during the first three quarters of 2010, down about 4% from the same period last year. Digital download spending, however, is up 37% so far this year, climbing to $432 million. Video on-demand spending is up 20% this year, reaching $1.2 billion. Physical is having a bit of a bad time, with spending on all discs down 8% this year. Blu-ray, however, is up 80% compared to last year, reaching $1 billion.
UK set top supplier Amino, has won a contract to provide its latest A140 and A540 MPEG-4 set top boxes to the City of Salisbury, North Carolina, as part of a major rollout of IPTV services across a new all fiber network. Salisbury is targeting 10,000 subscribers for its new service as part of a program to deliver advanced high-speed broadband access, entertainment services and local content to the local community under the brand name ‘Fibrant’. The middleware provider on the deal is Minerva.
Kabel Deutschland has acquired about 70,000 cable households from Primacom
for an undisclosed price. The cable households are in the city of Osnabr’ck in Lower Saxony and in Mainz in the Rhineland-Palatinate. KDH will initially provide signals to these homes through a wholesale contract with Primacom, but the deal will allow KDH to directly access the homes to offer triple play.
Apple and Google, once allies with shared board directors, have been at loggerheads all year as they fight to steer the mobile web market. Their latest clash is reported to be over mobile payments, with the two giants racing to acquire start-up Boku. According to sources who spoke to the TechCrunch blog, Boku’s senior management team has held talks with both Apple and Google in recent weeks, and has hopes of a bidding war. The track record favors Google, which beat Apple to the AdMob acquisition last year.
Sonic Solutions and Dolby Labs this week announced a collaboration to deliver Dolby Digital Plus on the RoxioNow online movie platform so that it can have high-quality surround sound.