Korea’s largest cable operator T-Broad has deployed Alticast’s Windmill eco-system based entirely on HTML 5. By offering native support for HTML5, Alticast’s Windmill makes it easy for T-Broad to launch companion device services on smart phones and tablets with the same UI. Sounds a bit like our ActiveVideo story further up today.
Orange satellite subsidiary GlobeCast has added 14 French-African channels to its MyGlobeTV, which it delivers OTT in the US and Latin America and a few other countries bringing programs from home countries for expatriates. It relies on a Netgem hybrid set top and uses adaptive bit rate streams.
Opera Software and German set top maker Kathrein TechnoTrend has put the Opera SDK on its set top model for rendering OTT video service UIs on HbbTV devices. It will support HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, 2D Canvas and WebGL. Tis also sounds a bit like our ActiveVideo story further up today.
Visionary Solutions says it has a cloud hosted TV channel guide called PackeTV Views. Sounds a bit like our ActiveVideo story further up today (blah blah, enough mentioning the ActiveVideo story ‘ Ed).
A UK company called UKFast says it has launched the first elastic cloud called eCloud. IT will go up against Amazon and Rackspace, but since it only cost £12m it is unlikely to be quite so all encompassing. UKFast says it has petabytes of high availability storage and is built on Cisco UCS Blade technology.
Quantenna Communications says that it has a reference integration with Intel Puma 6 chips for next gen home media servers for cable operators. A lot of US cablecos rely on these chips and Arris is known to be building devices with them in, so expect some major tier 1 Quantenna wins on the near horizon (sigh ‘ finally) for its 4×4 MIMO 802.11ac WiFi chips, which are probably the highest throughput WiFi chips being shipped today.
The number of pay TV subscribers in Western Europe increased by 1 million in 2012 to 94.1 million, and will climb by another million in 2013, according to a report from Digital TV Research. We seem to remember that a recent report from another supplier tried to convince us that pay TV was going backwards in Europe, this sits more in line with our own figures. Digital TV Research says that fell in Italy (down by 482,000) and Spain (down by 350,000) and will continue to fall there, but that both countries will recover in 2015. Germany was up 689,000 and in France by 347,000. And Digital TV Research says we will hit 100 million by 2018. Our numbers already show well over that, but we include the EU, and this is just Western Europe.
European TV researcher IDATE says that the global TV services market grew by 4.1% in 2012 reaching €329 billion and that it outperformed the consumer electronics market, which fell 7.1% to €260 billion. The top 10 media companies in 2012 were all in the US led by Comcast/NBC Universal, DirecTV, Time Warner, Walt Disney, News Corp, Time Warner Cable, Cox Enterprises, Dish Network, Viacom and CBS. Not sure how they worked that out, the Cox revenues were only $9 billion so no-one seems to have counted China Telecom or Liberty Global and they think that News Corp is an American company just because it moved its HQ there. Sloppy.
Irish-owned online television service AerTV part of Magnet is up 130% in customer usage for the first quarter of this year. It was only launched 18 months ago and has had 500,000 unique visits in the first three months of the year, with over 25 million minutes of television being consumed.
Canada’s government has blocked mobile operator Telus’ application to transfer Mobilicity’s spectrum licenses to Telus after it agreed to acquire the smaller operator for $380m in May. Looks like that deal will be off then.
EchoStar says it is launching a cloud-based intelligent personal technology management suite called Symbi, launched as a software-as-a-service product suite for call center problem resolution, service provisioning and live customer/agent interactions. The company says that it uses its patented Semantic Knowledge Management System which delivers guided content based on the end user’s actual technology environment.
It’s a bit late to challenge the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft because it happened in 2011, but that’s exactly what Cisco and Italian VoIP provider Messagenet have done, claiming that the European Commission has allowed the creation of a monopoly. Er’ didn’t Skype do that on its own, and anyway there are lots of rival digital phones services like Google Talk and Viber. It all came about because Microsoft boasted that one-third of the world’s voice calls are on Skype and that 280 million people use the service for more than 100 minutes each month.
Wal-Mart owned Vudu says that it is working with Gracenote to power video recognition for its new disk to digital conversion service, already in beta. Gracenote lets the Vudu system identify DVD and Blu-ray movies from their PC, and then get copies on any Vudu compatible devices.
Broadband TV News says that M7 Group has partnered with Stream Group in the Netherlands to offer OTT versions of its DTH TV services in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia using its Solocoo system. The Stream Group has just been acquired by shareholders of M7 group and so M7 will help the Stream Group rolling out services to other operators around the world.
DisplaySearch says that AMOLED phone panel shipments will reach 217 million units this year, up from 134 million units in 2012. This will also be on larger screen sizes so that AMOLED demand will grow from 263,000 square meters in Q1’13 to 557,000 square meters in Q1’14. Samsung Display makes and users the great bulk of all these screens, up to 5 inch displays and is expected to significantly extend capacity at its A2 Gen 5.5 fab this year and next.
Japan’s Access, says it is integrating its DLNA software and HTML5 browser into the set-top chips from Entropic. Remember Entropic is the MoCA chip company that bought the Trident set top business in the US. This will allow cable operators to add an IP interface and DLNA functionality to set tops, which is mostly relevant in Europe.
US recommendation specialist Digitalsmiths this week launched its Unified Data Service which creates a single index after multiple structured and unstructured video related data sources are ingested, aggregated, reconciled and stored to providing a master collection of metadata for service providers. This will support its Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery service.
The board of directors of Telecom Italia went ahead after all and approved the re-organization that will separate its access network from the rest of the business. We had reported statements made in the press that Telefonica, a controlling shareholder, was supposed to be against the idea.
UK based Oregan Networks which offers hybrid digital TV software has announced its 2012 results, with revenues up 17.9% focusing mostly on broadcast and IP TV convergence. We reported that it was one of the ingredients in the BT re-organization of its BT Vision pay TV service, which threw out Microsoft Mediaroom. Oregan did not give any hard numbers because it is a private company but said that it rolled out with Telefonica in Spain, Argentina and Brazil and has opened an office in Singapore from which to attack SE Asia. It too has a full HTML 5 browser.