Private US encoder company Envivio said that its year to the end of January was its most successful to date and it says it doubled both its revenues and its sales bookings, though doesn’t give hard numbers. Envivio is known for its encoded video streams on handsets and this is its first profitable year. Envivio says it had 250% growth year over year in the Americas and deployments at five of the top six Cable and Telecom operators in the US. Last week it also announced a new generation of its 4Caster C4 live encoders/transcoders for Mobile TV, Internet TV and IPTV.
Aspiro and Telenor have launched WiMP a new streaming music service, in Sweden, already being sold in Norway and Denmark. WiMP allows local editors to select and recommend songs, albums and artists and costs 99 kronor ( $15) a month. WiMP will be pre-installed on some phones in the coming months and
Telenor’s Swedish customers will have a chance to try the service free for 60 days.
Vidiator launched a new video streaming platform, Xenon 6.0 during the Mobile World Congress show. Video can be encoded once and distributed to different delivery platforms, such as the iPhone, Android, 3GPP handsets, tablets and PCs. Xenon 6.0 has been tested with Vidiator’s key customers in a 12 week beta program.
Smart card firm Gemalto says that it can bring Facebook to any phone which has a SIM, fairly cheaply, by embedding a Facebook application into the SIM. This should provide mobile subscribers with access to the core Facebook features such as friend requests, status updates, wall posts or messages. Interactive Facebook messages pop-up on the phone’s screen and users can also search their SIM phonebook for other friends and send them requests.
SES World Skies, a Division of SES in Luxembourg said it has entered into
a multi-year, multi-transponder agreement which covers all 12 Ku-band transponders on the India beam of its SES-7 satellite. The capacity on SES-7 will be used to support the growth and expansion of India’s thriving DTH market. Faultline tracked about 10 million DTH adds in India during 2009 and expects a similar number for 2010, and more services are launching all the time. SES currently supplies capacity to the Indian market via four satellites and says it is committed to meet the growing demand requirements of the Indian DTH market, which is the fastest growing DTH market in the world with an estimated 30 million subscribers and is projected to overtake the US as the largest DTH market.
Skype has announced a Mobile Partner Program for operators in markets with low 3G broadband penetration. The program aims to bring the Skype experience to a broad range of mobile users and follows the successful operator partnerships that Skype has already launched with Verizon, KDDI and Hutchison 3. It is a simplified operator program which enables use of Skype on a broad range of 100 handsets including smartphones and feature phones, with minimal battery impact.
Tivo’s licensee in Australia, Hybrid TV, is apparently in some financial difficulty says The Register there, It has cut back the local office to just five staff from 40 and is in advanced talks to offload the product to IPTV rival FetchTV.
Sweden HQ’d TeliaSonera which operates right the way across Scandinavia and in emerging Eurasian markets, says that its broadband subscribers rose to 2.4 million, up 54,000 from a year ago and its total TV subs also rose by 137,000 to 900,000. Fixed voice subs fell by 546,000 to just 4.7 million although VoIP customers went up by 55,000 in the quarter to 374,000.
Broadband TV News says that Kabel Deutschland Group (KDG) will buy a Berlin cable network BMH Berlin Mediahaus (BMH,) serving 60,000 homes. It bought it from a housing association GSW Immobilien AG. Previously it served these homes via a wholesale agreement.
Freescale Semiconductor, partly owned by the Blackstone Group, says it will raise $1.15 billion in one of the largest US IPOs since Google went public in 2004. Proceeds will mostly be used to pay down debt of which it has a total of $7.62 billion, with about 10% of that due fairly soon. The stock market has recently thought highly of semiconductor stocks, hence the move instead of replacing it with more debt.
Cisco has launched Cisco Move, which it calls a strategic framework, at the Mobile World Congress, the idea being that cellcos can use an intelligent router to push traffic, especially video, through WiFi by preference, where it exists. Move stands for Monetization, Optimization, Videoscape Experience and it relies on Cisco products such as Mobile Videoscape, Cisco Service Provider Wi-Fi and Cisco Adaptive Intelligent Routing. Cisco has been saying for some time that most cellular traffic will be video soon, so this is a pitch to alleviate some of the network stress that causes.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) said that May 2011 will be the last call for any technologies that are to be put into the HTML5 Standard and to confirm the soundness of the platform. The group will then shift focus to gathering implementation experience and developing a test suite to achieve broad interoperability by 2014.
Another story in Broadband TV News says that Vodafone Germany is rolling out its Vodafone TV service with a hybrid Vodafone TV Center at the heart of the system. This is a hybrid between analog cable and digital satellite with Over The Top IP offerings as well with the device picking the most appropriate reception. This service was supposed to be out by December 2010 but is now ready to be deployed along with a 16 Mbps broadband line and TV with 50 SD Channels and 12 HD all for €40 a month.
According to Reuters there has been a deal stuck between Deutsche Telekom and Sky Deutschland to include Sky channels within its cable networks. Specifically that means TV bundles of channels that it sells through cable companies. The same TV channels will not be sold on its T-Entertain IPTV service. Deutsche will add Sky programs into its NE 3 and NE 4 cable networks including to households who already get this bundle. Sky has access to top-flight Bundesliga soccer as well as movies. Mostly these channels are offered to tiny cable operations run by housing associations across Germany.
US researcher In-Stat says that broadband in the US is going up in speed and went up by an average of 34% throughout 2010. The majority of broadband subscribers say they are now satisfied with their current speed. The average has moved from 7.12 Mbps a year ago to 9.54 Mbps now and 38% of respondents also had a mobile wireless broadband connection. Speeds have gone up over two years by 71% and both cable modems and FTTH have shown the greatest speed increases.
In the US the leading DVD kiosk group Redbox says that it is planning to upgrade its movie business to an online business like Netflix at some point, but has not specified technology choices or dates beyond it being introduced this year. Redbox has 30,000 kiosks, so why not simply upgrade them to be download and burn stations?
Motorola Mobility said this week at Mobile World Congress that Carphone Warehouse, Best Buy and Currys and PC World in the UK as well as Deutsche Telekom (presumably through T-Mobile) will all introduce the new Xoom tablet in the second quarter. Carphone and Best Buy will offer it with 3G or WiFi and Currys and PC World will launch it with only WiFi.
Apple has clarified its position on selling subscriptions such as newspapers and at the same time tried to put a positive spin on it, suggesting that its new policy is an extension of the deal for the New Corps’ ‘The Daily.’ But it also re-iterates the recently revealed idea that Apple has to get 30% by hook or by crook of anything that is sold on its store and that there can be no downloading from a third party web site through the app, but in-App purchasing can be used. If a subscription is sold separately through a web site, it must be at the same price as sold through Apple.