It looks like Vodafone and Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) have given up the ghost, and it was a really thin ghost at that, on mobile TV. The upstart 3 Italia has gathered about 1 million paying customers and has begun creating much of its own content, but its two leading cellco rivals who each had partnership deals with MediaSet’s DVB-H network, are throwing in the towel, with Telecom Italia closing its service at the end of the year and Vodafone contractually due to continue into 2011, but unlikely to stay the course long term. 3 Italia has cornered the market and is the only European success story for DVB-H. Vodafone and TIM were reported as paying €14 million a year for infrastructure, but clearly are not losing enough subscribers to 3 Italia to warrant the continued investment. Neither of them subsidized handsets for DVB-H and even 3 Italia is said to be losing money on its investment, though initially it probably brought 3 about 500,000 new subs from the two leading operators.
Time Warner Cable has broken ranks with US cablecos and begun offering a cable package at the low end, which is called TV Essentials. It says that it’s for video customers facing difficult choices during tough economic times. It will go into commercial trials in the next few weeks in the company’s New York and Northeast Ohio divisions and more launches are planned for 2011. It will offer local channels from ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS plus 12 of the top 20 Nielsen-rated cable channels, plus a few other channels covering the major genres. It comes with two SD set-top choices one with music options and features like StartOver and LookBack . The new bottom rate is $50 a month, discounted to $40 in New York and $30 a month in Ohio.
LG subsidiary Innotek has taken Chinese DTMB terrestrial TV demodulators from AltoBeam, using the ATBM884x family, which it says has demonstrated exceptional receiving qualities under multi-path conditions.
UK radio chip specialist Mirics has partnered with Brazilian company ArcSoft with its FlexiTV software-based global TV receiver. ArcSoft will offer a receiver to view HD TV on PCs which have the Mirics FlexiTV combined with the ArcSoft TotalMedia 3.5 software and it will ship the combination to ODMs in the region.
TeleGeography says that IPTV reached 40.5 million homes by end of September, up 8% from the previous quarter and 37% from a year ago. The company counts 160 service providers in 74 countries. France remains in the lead with 24% of the total followed by the US (16%), China (16%), South Korea (8%), Japan (4%), Germany (3%) and Hong Kong (3%). Completing the top ten are Belgium, Spain and Taiwan, with each accounting for 2% of global subscribers.
US Orb Networks has just launched an internet TV set top shaped rather like a hockey puck which allows viewing of TV shows from Hulu, Netflix and others. For $99, the same price as Apple TV, which requires that you pay for the content. It needs special software called Orb Caster which runs on your PC and streams to your TV through the set top. It does however trump Google TV in that Hulu is available, as are the web site held videos of the major TV networks, and uses an iPhone or Android phone as a remote and has its own internet video search tool.
Jim Balsillie, one of the two CEOs at Research In Motion said this week that its PlayBook tablet will be three or four times faster than Apple’s iPad. That’s an interesting criticism given that no-one has actually said that the iPad is slow. He also said that tablets weren’t about Apps, but about web connectivity and laughed at the idea that a web site owner has to go away and write an App so that a phone can view a site. The Playbook is imminently available and will connect to broadband wireless through a paired BlackBerry device or Wi-Fi and shortly into its life will come with NFC touch and pay technology, but not from day one.
The GSMA says that a group of operators have been chosen to experiment with
the development of an embedded SIM which can be remotely activated which will be used in new machine to machine (M2M) services in the future. The task force includes AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, KT, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telef’nica, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone ‘ so all the great and the good. The group will work in cooperation with major SIM producers. The idea is to examine market requirements and offer up a technical solution including programmable SIM cards which allow remote activation. They will report by January 2011.
Netflix went ahead this week and did what its CEO Reed Hastings has been heavily hinting at, which is to launch in the US an online only video service, without any DVD rental element, for $7.99 a month. The company had said that if things went well in its Canadian launch it would bring the deal to the US and while some are suggesting that its pricing is a copy of the new Hulu Plus pricing, the truth is the other way around. Netflix had floated this price several months ago as a likely price which is why Hulu Plus finally settled on it. Netflix has also raised the price of its $9 a month deal to take a single DVD plus streaming, to $10 a month. In fact all of its price plans have increased if you sign up after January, probably a reflection of the Chapter XI bankruptcy which rival Blockbuster is going through.
Initially Viacom appeared to be letting Google TV owners see some of its shows, but the company has now moved to join the new trend in blocking Google TV’s access to its web video. It joins many of the top US broadcasters in keeping its content off the new set top. Not sure anyone realizes this is a breach of Net Neutrality and Google can quickly imitate a different device if it chooses to. If you try to go to the Viacom site using Google TV, it just says that the web sites does not support this device, which is quite simply a fabrication.
US researcher In-Stat says that China’s web TV market began in 2009 when it reached 2 million web enabled TV sets, but says it will exceed 15 million units by 2014.
NPD’s DisplaySearch team says that LED-backlit LCD TV prices have fallen 44% over the past year to an average price of $1,106. Meanwhile traditional LCD TVs have also fallen 24% to $435. While prices for LED chips are falling steadily, the pricing dynamic for the LCD panels themselves is somewhat more complex. After the economic downturn, demand returned quicker than expected in 2009, and the supply chain was faced with product shortages during the second half of the year that fed rising prices for LCD TV panels into the first half of 2010. Since it takes about three months to move through the LCD TV supply chain, the rising panel prices led to slower average selling price declines at retail during the first half of 2010.