Swedish home gateway business Tilgin said it has received a major FTTX order for South Eastern Europe for a multiplay and next-generation broadband access, from Datateknik, a large systems integrator based in Turkey. This is a follow-up order to orders announced in October and November last year, and is for a major operator in the region. The deal involves Tilgin’s Home Gateway solutions for fiber connectivity and its VCM software for service and device management. In the order of 6 million SEK (just under $1 million). Tilgin sold its set top business to the UK’s Amino a few years ago.
California IPTV start-up OneFi Technology said it has finished testing of its bi-directional IPTV platform and is ready to launch it. The company is basing the design on the needs of US funding agencies which require TV vendors to not only deliver content, but also be able to broadcast back out to the public on issues of safety, education, and health care applications.
Modern Times Group said that it will launch its third free-TV channel in the Czech Republic on 8 March called Prima LOVE, focused on attracting a 15-44 year old female audience. Content are things like Glee, Gossip Girl, Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, the L-Word and Ally McBeal, as well as blockbuster romantic and comedy movies and can reach over 60% of the potential audience on the Czech digital terrestrial TV network, and will also be available for distribution through cable, satellite and IPTV networks.
Intel this week has purchased outright one of its early stage investments, Silicon Hive, in order to bring better still imaging and multimedia video processing to its Atom chips. Silicon Hive is headquartered in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, has around 65 staff in San Jose, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangalore and Belgrade and was spun out from Philips in 2008. It sells licenses to customized parallel processing DSP accelerators. The amount paid was not disclosed.
US cable equipment supplier Arris said it will add DVB functionality, which we take to mean all or some of DVB-T, DVB-T2, DVB-H DVB-C and DVB-S formatting, to its VIPr video transcoding platform. The Arris VIPr encoders support HD transcoding from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats, at a constant bit rate for switched video applications and in variable bit rate with statistical multiplexing.
A special Gold edition of the Motorola XOOM will be given away to Oscar nominees for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director. That’s a promotional opportunity that other Tablets have missed.
Italian broadcaster Mediaset says that it has its own version of an Over The Top offering, somewhere between the BBC’s iPlayer and Hulu Plus, called Premium Net TV, which offers over 1,000 videos, some in HD, including films, TV series, cartoons, documentaries and football. It also offers catch up for Mediaset broadcast programming from the last seven days. It can be viewed on a PC or on a broadband enabled TV set, says Mediaset and requires what it calls a Gold Stamp digital decoder and a broadband connection from any telephone carrier, which we think means any MHP-based Connected TV. It also allows film rental in the same release period as DVDs, from Warner, Universal, Medusa and 01 Distribution.
US IPTV conditional access specialist Verimatrix says it plans to offer a service which helps operators migrate from one conditional access to another when they are looking to re-evaluate or expand their ‘security platform’. We would have thought that every conditional access firm has to do that already. Verimatrix says it will target migration from legacy smart card systems to IP-centric security and says it can do it without disrupting existing services.