The purchase by Vivendi of the 44% of 2nd placed French cellular outfit SFR which it didn’t own, from Vodafone, also has a few implications for the Pay TV business over there, because it also owns the IPTV player once called Neuf which has 2.4 million IPTV subscribers. There is no change of control, so there is unlikely to be any strategy change, but Vodafone won’t have the right to look over the shoulder of a successful IPTV service and copy the details around Europe ‘ not that it ever has, since its strategy has always been on a country by country basis. Meanwhile Vodafone spent $5 billion of the $11 billion cash it got on buying out Essar in India, so it still has lots of cash if it wants to buy into more fixed line business.
The Wall Street Journal is the favorite place for studios to drop their news, and a the top six told the US newspaper that they were suing the over the Internet movie-rental company, Zediva, as we predicted they would want to. What we didn’t work out was how the company was breaking the rules since it buys DVDs and plays them over the web. The logic has been to say that this constitutes a public performance, and that it must pay royalties. Zediva may have to pay for more expensive DVDs since they are rental DVDs, but it argues that no royalty is required because it’s just DVD rental. This will be a long and messy legal action one supposes.
Arris says that it has a new version of its ConvergeMedia Flex Streaming engine call the XMS Flex engine. In August Arris launched a version of the VoD server software for small to large VOD installations using a managed CDN edge server, a library server, a time-shifted TV Server and management software, and now has upgraded this to full lifecycle content management including intelligent asset management, across the CDN in a lights out operation which it says can scale dynamically. Lights out is a term used in IT for a server farm that doesn’t need people. The system includes advertising management, personalized ad insertion into VoD, and OnDemand support for ALL screens.
The Verivue group we met for the first time at IPTV World Forum has cut one of its earliest deals in Europe with Telekomunikacja Polska, the France Telecom owned telco for its OneVantage Content Delivery system. TP has with half a million pay TV customers, half IPTV and half satellite and has now built a national CDN to deliver a broad range of content services to its subscribers, presumably VoD. The initial service has already been use to offer live streaming of several major events across Poland, capturing some of the largest online audiences in Polish history. This week Verivue, announced its OneVantage integrated suite of CDN software tools used in this deal, which it says has all the elements to offer a multi-tenant CDN network, including a high performance cache, a request router for dynamic cache selection, and a full management and analytics suite. Verivue was featured in our IPTV World Forum discussion on CDNs and how they will form a key battleground in OTT video delivery.
Microsoft appears to be shipping its tablet version of its OS, Windows 8, to select hardware partners. Windows Phone 7 is barred from large screen devices and Windows 7 slates are seen by many as cumbersome. Key features are support for tablets and a back-up facility called History Vault, similar to Apple’s Time Machine. Microsoft is tightlipped, but at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, it hinted that the OS should ship in late 2011 or early 2012. The reports surfaced on the WinRumors blog, with Hewlett-Packard understood to be the first OEM to receive the preliminary release. HP’s tablet plans have been as confused as Microsoft’s, with Android and webOS vying for attention.
Opera Software has announced a new deal with Humax, putting its SDK on the Humax Hybrid set-top box, including HbbTV. The toolkit can be applied across a wide range of devices including set tops, connected TVs, mobile Internet devices, IP telephones and media players and has just been upgraded to version 3.0 with a new SVG engine, better HTML5 compliance and simpler integration into HbbTV.
Canada’s Bluestreak Technology said it has been selected by Orange to deliver its new Orange cin’ma s’ries on demand service to mobile devices and tablets. Consumers who subscribe to the service can now download movies to their mobiles and watch them offline up to 30 days after it has been broadcasted.
Bluestreak worked with Labgency for the framework, application and servers to host the application; VisualOn for the media player and Authentec for the client-side DRM, which supplied a downloadable PlayReady client from Microsoft.
UK researcher Juniper Research says that mobile entertainment will grow by 15% in 2011 despite global economic uncertainty, rising from $33.2 billion to nearly $38.4 billion on the back of mostly the app store-led content delivery model, which has greatly benefitted smaller content developers, including the rise of Rovio’s Angry Birds and Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump, which have each achieved more than £10 million in paid downloads.
Thomson Video Networks said that China’s largest cable operator, Fujian Southeast Cable, has upgraded its headend using Thomson gear. Fujian Southeast Cable broadcasts to four million subscribers in the province, providing 11 television channels and six channels of audio. Thomson installed a range of ViBE encoders, NetProcessor 9030 Multiplexers, an Amethyst switcher and the XMS management system.
Sandvine has supplied its network policy control systems to Telefonica bringing it detailed network reporting across its global footprint of 20 countries. The system collects data from the operator’s network, using the Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) platform, organizes and displays it intelligently for management analysis.
HomeGrid Forum said that the G.hnem standard has entered the final stages of approval at the ITU, with two new recommendations the, G.9955 (PHY and system architecture) and G.9956 (DLL). This standard is for low frequency (9-500 KHz) powerline communications for smart meters, energy management, electric vehicle communications and home automation and offers performance of up to 1 Mbps and can operate in the CENELEC as well as the FCC bands.
Two of the oldest names in the semiconductor business, Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor, are to merge to create a powerhouse in analog chips. A high end handset usually has about 30 of these chips, which are also important in sectors such as auto, medical and industrial. Analog chips feature passive elements that are used for mixed signal processing in electronic devices. It is thought that other analog suppliers will be forced to consider similar consolidation. TI used to have 40% of its business as analog and 40% DSP but it has since chased what it sees as a bigger market in analog and DSP has fallen away somewhat. After the closure of the NatSemi deal, analog will rise from 43% of TI’s revenue to 50% and will add 12,000 products to TI’s existing catalog of 30,000 and make it the third largest semiconductor supplier in the world after Intel and Samsung.