The Australian press has been widely seen quoting Foxtel boss Kim Williams about his plans to turn Foxtel into an unmanaged IP video delivery platform and transition out of its existing mass broadcast model. Now it has started to be picked up by technical publications as an example of one of the most radical changes of direction in the broadcasting world. Williams has been giving the same speech at a variety of conferences and he has pre-announced a new set top which sounds similar to the hybrid set tops emerging in Europe and says instead of being broadcast centric with strong IP function, it will be IP-centric with strong broadcast function. Sounds to us a little like the BBC’s YouView plans and the European Broadcasters HbbTV operations. Williams he says it will come to market within two years under the existing brand of iQHD hybrid set top brought. Foxtel already offers internet delivered material via its On Demand service.
US pay TV research company IMS says that while VoD is now growing strongly for pay-TV, games on demand is not set to go the same way. IMS says that 13.2% of all digital pay-TV subscriber homes currently use VoD and this is forecast to triple over the next five years, from 53.9 million to 157.3 million by 2015. VoD was responsible for $4.3 billion or revenues in 2010, and by contrast games on-demand will only generate $569 million by 2016. IMS says ‘Games on-demand via the set-top box is still a very nascent market.’
At the beginning of March French satellite service Globecast announced it had landed Starmax in Spain as a new customer and it is only now that people are starting to realize this is a brand new Spanish pay TV operator. It has GlobeCast offering content aggregation, encryption and the virtual head end and subscriptions will be sold on a pay as you go basis. If you buy a year in advance it comes for €10 a month. The compression is H.264 and encryption technology comes from Conax.
Spain has one of the lowest penetrations of pay TV in Europe at around 25% (4.5 million) of its 17.5 million TV homes. The Prisa owned Sogecable’s Digital Plus service is the main satellite contender with 1.8 million subs, owning 40% of the pay TV market, so given that about 32% of Spanish homes are not reached by Broadband, there seems to be plenty of room for another DTH player there.
IDC has released a report this week suggesting that Microsoft Windows Phone 7 will overtake Apple iOS by 2015 in smartphones. Is this based on taking Nokia’s current market share and simply allocating it to Microsoft? Give or take a bit of dwindling? Or does this prediction stem from a serious belief that WP7 is simply better? Or that Apple has somehow lost the plot and its way in a post Jobs era? Perhaps a little of each. Final figures for the report show Android ending this period with a 45% market share, WP7 on 21%; Blackberry on 13.7% from 14.9% now ‘ quite generous; and Apple’s iOS on 15.3% from 15.7% now. Symbian will fall from 21% to 0.2%. So that suggests that first strategy, taking the existing market shares and swapping Symbian for WP7. We would venture to suggest that technology transitions are somewhat more complex than that.
IBM this week set up the Institute for Advanced Security in Europe, a Brussels based initiative to provide government and other key organizations with a global network of security research, services, software and technology expertise. IBM has some 15,000 multi-disciplinary security experts worldwide to address a broad range of cyber security challenges and will consult in analytics, privacy-sensitive identity technology and encryption and cloud computing and endpoint management. Doesn’t mention conditional access, but we’re sure content encryption is in there somewhere.
The HomePNA Alliance has announced Fast EoC, a new industry spec which will deliver 300 Mbps user data throughput to Multi-Dwelling Unit environments in a new ‘enhanced’ mode. HomePNA’s Fast EoC targets broadband access in MDU and Hospitality markets. Fast EoC-based HomePNA is available today on a chip from Sigma Designs.
On Demand Deutschland, part of the On Demand Group, a VoD and Pay Per View aggregator, has announced a deal with Constantin Film to provide 3D movies on demand from the same date as their release on DVD to A1 Telekom Austria for its aonTV IPTV subscribers. The movies will be available in SD and HD and subscribers will need a 3D TV and an HDTV set-top box.
eBay is over its acquisition hangover brought on by buying Skype for $3 billion back in 2005 and has bid $2.4 billion for GSI Commerce offering a huge 51% premium to its closing share price on 28 March. GSI is still open for counter bids but assuming it goes to eBay will bring a full service of ecommerce, such as shopping basket and checkout services, fulfillment, customer care and online marketing, to some of the world’s biggest web brands ‘ including Toys’R’Us, Dell, Timberland, Boots, RadioShack and Mattel. GSI is seen as an entity much more like eBay than Skype was, and eBay largely doesn’t to compete with the GSI customer base.
Amazon said this week that customers who buy a subscription to the New York Times for their Kindle, will also get free access to the New York Times Web site at no extra cost. This is likely because Kindle has done so well for the New York Times through its Kindle store, it being the best-selling newspaper there.
mgMedia in Spain which owns the Open4Content multi-screen platform, has cut a deal with LG Spain to develop TV Apps for connected TVs. mgMedia has a team which specializes in the development of this type of App and has designed and developed platforms like the cinema shop ‘Chili’ from Fastweb (Swisscom Group) as well as the Telepizza home delivery channel.
US Researcher In-Stat says that in the fourth quarter of 2010, 36.8 million broadband CPE units shipped, up 1.2% sequentially and up 0.8% over this time last year bringing in revenues of $1.6 billion. It has Technicolor in the lead in this market with Netgear in second spot, followed by D-Link and says that D-Link and Actiontec both grew revenues over 80% .
News Corp is reported to have started talks with Vevo, a music video site owned by several of the large record labels, to sell it control of Myspace. This has come out of a strategic review of Myspace at News Corp. It is thought that no money will change hands, but that Myspace will be donated for shares in the combined entity. Vevo is owned by Universal Music, Sony Music and the Abu Dhabi Media Company and both Sony and Universal are also investors in Myspace Music.
Smart card maker Gemalto says that it has got a UICC embedded application through compliance testing with Mastercard. Both the App and the UICC have passed compliance. Most cellphone operators see the UICC, the modern replacement for a SIM card, as a host for tens, if not hundreds, of applications, one for each bank, retailer or travel operator and see rental of these spaces as the key to enabling a business model using touch and go NFC technology. Gemalto says this paves the way for mass commercial rollouts of NFC payments. Gemalto also says that in the UK it is partnering with a ‘global, first-tier financial institution’ and a ‘world leading mobile operator,’ with the new solution in a mass commercial rollout. That would be Barclays and O2, in time for the Olympics, but don’t tell anyone.
The Roku device which has been one of the cheapest for bringing Over The Top video to US homes, will go on sale at Best Buy and other retailers shortly. So far Roku has sold 1 million players from its website with no retail presence. It is probably the cheapest device for getting Netflix in the US. The Roku XD model featuring 1080p playback and 802.11n WiFi will be the focus on the campaign costing $80. Other retail stores to carry it are BJ’s Wholesale Club, Fry’s Electronics and RadioShack.
Netflix has changed the defaults on its video delivery for its Canadian movie service, worried that ISPs there have set data caps which will mean Canadian customers could get stung with penalty payments. It has adjusted its video streaming service to cut down on the amount of data it uses, although users can override this in their settings. Netflix it will now use only a third of the data on average, and says that with the new settings, 30 hours of streaming will go from using 31 GB of data to only 9 GB, bringing it into line with Canadian ISP caps which are between 20 and 60 GB. Netflix also said that it has secured the Canadian rights to hundreds of movies from Paramount Pictures in a five year deal.