Hard on the heels of Kaltura’s win at the OTT deployment at Kabel Deutschland in Germany, it has landed a major TV Everywhere service in Latin America for Turner Broadcasting. Turner is providing its own branded OTT service, for anyone who subscribes to its TV channels through local MSOs in the region, and Kaltura has built out Apps for iOS and Android. It sits on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure and includes live TV channels, and a VoD catalog in Spanish and Portuguese.
Cablevision Systems this week reported Q4 and full year results with revenues for the quarter up 3% to $1.631 billion, and for the year up 3.7% to $6.461 billion. Revenue per customer (ARPU) was $155.20 a month.Cablevision lost 34,000 video customers to go down to 2,681,000 and only increased its broadband by 4,000 to 2,760,000 and lost 11,000 telephony customers. The company had net income of $56 million on the quarter, up from $52 million last time and on the year it was $311 million, down from $465.6 million. We can see that a lot of its growth will rely on the recently launched Freewheel WiFi only phone service for the New York area.
Liberty Media’s tracking stock, Starz Networks reported full year 2014 revenue of $1.3 billion, up 1% after Q4 revenues of $332.6 million, up 3%. Starz added 1.1 million subscriptions and combined Starz/ Encore subscriptions reached 57.3 million. Both Starz and Encore launched on Google Chromecast in the quarter. Net income was $77.4 million compared to $72.5 million this time last year.
Apple has lost a jury trial and has been ordered to pay $532.9 million to private company Smartflash which claimed that iTunes and the Appstore used 8 patents, which linked video assets to payments for them, along with DRM and storage technologies. The jury trial was held in Tyler Texas, and Apple plans to appeal the result. The patent breach is said to have occurred in applications such as Game Circus’s Coin Dozer and 4 Pics 1 Movie rather than in Apple products directly. Smartflash is being described by Apple as a patent troll. The award is based on a percentage of sales of Apple devices. Smartflash has also sued Google, HTC and Samsung over the same patents, so there’s more where that came from.
Video optimization specialist Allot Communications said this week it has acquired Optenet, providing Security-as-a-Service to service providers and will pay $6.5 million up front plus up to $5.5 million deferred payments, as well as a performance based earn-out over five years. The earn-out is capped at $26 million and is contingent upon reaching $140 million in revenues. The two companies have been working together for two years and have jointly won 10 service provider customers.
Danish UDP multicast specialist Octoshape, has partnered with VIVOplay, the OTT content provider in Latin-America, to provide live video streaming services for the Festival Viña del Mar 2015. VIVOplay will leverage Octoshape’s suite of multi-screen broadband stream acceleration and multicast technologies for distribution of high quality, live coverage to Apple TV and Chromecast devices from anywhere in Latin America, USA, Spain and Portugal.
Nielsen, through its finance subsidiaries says it will offer $750 million of 5% senior notes which are due in 2022 in a private offering. The Notes will trade interchangeably with $750 million and $800 million of existing 5.00% Senior Notes already issued by Nielsen Finance in April and July last year. Given the way the rise of OTT video could eliminate the need for Nielsen audience measurement, it is just as well for it to pile up cash reserves.
Arris said this week that it will provide AU$400 million of Hybrid Fiber Coax equipment and services so NBN Co in Australia, to build a new cable network. Australian newspaper Communications Day said Arris had beat out Cisco for the business. The contract is based around DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 infrastructure on long cable runs of up to 10 kilometers, using the Arris E6000 edge router, CORWave transmitters and OM4100 optical receivers.
Discovery Communications reported full year revenues of $6.27 billion, up 13%, over last year. Q4 was up 9% to $1.7 billion, led by 17% growth at international networks, compared to a 1% growth in US Networks. For the year, international networks revenue was up 28%, while US networks remained flat.
US Chip designer Marvell reported financial results for Q4 ended January 31 with revenues of $857 million. It reported year end revenues of $3.7 billion and delivered net income of $82 million for Q4 and $435 million on the year. Key quarterly announcements included a new Octa Core Mobile SoC and a new Flagship MX4 Pro Premium 4G LTE Smartphone for China Mobile and China Unicom and a Skyworth Smart TV based on G.hn Powerline communications from Marvell and a new MU-MIMO chip launched for WiFi.
Panasonic Avionics and Intertrust have announced this week that Panasonic’s wireless in-flight entertainment system eXW, uses Intertrust’s ExpressPlay Marlin DRM technology to protect and manage in-flight content libraries. Panasonic’s eXW delivers movies, music, news and in-cabin services to passenger personal electronic devices, and supports Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, as well browsers on laptops.
Futuresource Consulting says that 4k TV sets are expected to ship 11.6 million units in 2014, up 699% year on year, with China accounting for over 70% of worldwide demand (84% in 2013). By 2018 100 million sets are forecast to ship per annum, when ownership will exceed 20% in leading markets. Falling premiums and 4k in smaller screen sizes will drive adoption.
After an investigation by the European Commission, Liberty Global has been cleared to buy a stake of Belgian media company De Vijver and it will now close in a few days. Back in June the deal was announced with Liberty Global’s Telenet bidding for 50 % in De Vijver Media, by acquiring Sanoma’s share for €26 million plus offering an additional €32 million cash to the company. The Commission had concerns that, after the transaction, De Vijver would refuse to license channels to Telenet rivals, but has now secured commitments to continue to operate under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.