TiVo Q4 numbers have impressed the market coming in at $91.7 million, exceeding guidance and driving net income of $7.1 million. Subs were up 30% year on year adding 1.3 million to bring the total to a record 5.5 million. MSO subs growth led, up 40% or 324,000. TiVo owned subs were up 20%, its best in 7 years. Its recommendation acquisition DigitalSmiths grew 25%. The company mentioned a new deal just signed at Frontier in the US, and a stronger relationship with ONO in Spain since Vodafone took it over. Subscribers there have grown to 500,000. TiVo gave guidance of $90 million to $92 million for Q1 2015 with and net income between $5 million to $8 million. TiVo is acquiring the assets of bankrupt Aereo, though it is unclear why.
US cableco Charter, reflecting the increasing aim of US cablecos to go after Enterprise revenue has renamed its Charter Business as Spectrum Business, aimed at small and medium sized businesses. It will offer Internet at 60Mbps for $40 and fixed voice for $30, rising to scalable Ethernet up to 1Gbps and fiber Internet up to 10Gbps.
US billing and OSS provider CSG International, has introduced Ascendon, a cloud based service platform, to scale and monetize new services such as OTT video music, games and home security. CSG says Ascendon enables providers to build, manage and monetize new customer relationships across multiple devices and payment methods. It also handles merchandizing offers and orders. CSG says it has helped companies like Comcast implement Xfinity On Campus and Sony Pictures, to monetize new services.
Sony Pictures Television and OCS (Orange Cinema Series) have agreed a major multi-year deal giving the French pay TV operator exclusive access to a wide range of movies and TV series including films like Elysium, White House Down, Captain Phillips and Equalizer.
ONO in Spain will upgrade its TiVo offering to take advantage of TiVo’s latest generation of capabilities. A refreshed user experience which runs across any device will be launched using TiVo’s cloud service APIs.
Synacor said this week that it has integrated its multiscreen video solutions with thePlatform video publishing software mpx which can handle multiscreen video workflow, policy management, and playback services.
Forthnet, which owns Nova, the largest pay TV satellite platform in Greece, has chosen an Electra based headend with video analytics, from Harmonic, to support its direct-to-home service. It was installed by Harmonic’s local channel partner OmniWave. Nova still uses a mix of MPEG2, MPEG4 and DVB-S2 compression in both SD and HD. The system will also use Harmonic’s ProStream processors for statistical multiplexing of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 services in multiple streams.
US pay TV as measured by the top 13 providers representing 95% of the market, has lost 125,000 net video subscribers during 2014, says Leichtman Research. The same method showed 95,000 of losses during 2013. The top 9 cable companies lost 1.195 million, while the major telco providers added 1.05 million. Satellite TV added just 20,000 video subscribers. This compares to wider cable losses of 1.695 million subscribers the year before, but smaller telephone and satellite gains. Total US pay TV subs among this top 13 came to 95.2 million at the end of 2014, with cable on 49.3 million, satellite 34.3 million and Telcos on 11.59 million.
Video monetization firm Freewheel has put out some research which claims that TV Everywhere usage is skyrocketing in the US, jumping 591% in the quarter. TV Everywhere services now account for 56% of long form and live content monetization online, according to the report. Live TV streams grew 297% over last year driven largely by sports programming such as the Winter Sochi Olympics and the World Cup. As broadcast networks saw TV ratings drop, digital viewing has spiked so dramatically it suggests viewers are not going away so much as finding new ways to connect. Freewheel said traffic on net top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TVs, PlayStations and Xboxes, grew 236% over last year.
Swedish video delivery company Edgeware, has partnered with Oregon US based CSI Digital, to provide hosted solutions for cable and telco operators in the US to help upgrade to modern IP delivery for multiscreen. The joint offering is a hosted IP multiscreen solution based on Edgeware’s Video Consolidation Platform. Edgeware has done well in Europe but has no US clients we know of.
Global advertising reached $525 billion in 2014 says Strategy Analytics, with the US accounting for more than a third of global ad spend almost 5 times higher than second placed China, which overtook Japan back in 2013 with Germany and the UK in 4th and 5th places. Advertising grew at 5.3% year on year says the report, and will increase by a similar amount again this year, passing $600 billion in 2017.
Canada’s Quickplay Media, the OTT video provider has acquired Roundbox, a specialist in video optimization for mobile networks. The acquisition supports Quickplay’s aims to monetize premium viewing across LTE Broadcast, WiFi, 3G, and 4G. Roundbox technology has been widely deployed globally at service providers such as KDDI in Japan and Telecom Italia Mobile.
Nvidia has launched Shield an Android TV console built around the Tegra X1 with 256 GPU cores, and it will have 200 gaming titles on it at launch and what it claims is one teraflops of computing power. The system will have support for 4K TV at 60 frames per second. This is the first time that Nvidia has tried to go direct to consumers with a device of its own, unless you count the accelerator boards it is famous for selling to making real time gaming go faster. The system was launched at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Because Shield runs Android TV, it works with Google Play apps and offers VP9 encoding.
The International Business Times said this week that sources close to the two companies say that HBO will have Apple TV as one of its OTT launch partners, when it comes out next month in time for the fifth season of the “Game of Thrones.” The price of $15 a month has been cited by the same sources, as the price for the service. It will be called HBO Now says the paper.