British Telecom will recruit ex-Sky CEO Tony Ball to help out with its BT Vision IPTV hybrid to replace the departing Dan Marks. Most recently Ball has been on the boards of both Kabel Deutschland and Spanish cableco ONO and left Sky in 2003.
In Germany the Federal Network Agency says that it has nailed down agreed rates for rivals to connect to Deutsche Telekom street cabinets for competitive access at the local loop. It says the charges will vary depending on loop length and the Agency didn’t publish actual numbers, but says that an acceptable charging mechanism is now in place. This has been a major stumbling block in Germany, as DT has behaved like European unbundling rules just didn’t apply to it.
The old Netherlands Tulip PC business has finally faltered, under its new name of Nedfield, during the recession. It has entered bankruptcy along with subsidiaries including 2L International, a holding company for consumer electronics including the Conceptronic, Grab’n’GO and Abbrazzio brands. 2L issued a statement saying that it was negotiating with third parties and would be back operating in a few weeks. It has operational subsidiaries in Spain and Taiwan which will continue trading during the bankruptcy.
Global VoD orders from consumers rose 21% in 2008 over previous years says research from audience-measurement firm Rentrak. Pay TV operators delivered 3.8 billion VOD orders not counting adult programming. VoD buyers ordered an average 17.8 VoD assets per month in 2008, and in any given month around 13% VOD-enabled set-top boxes made a purchase. The Rentrak report was based on the OnDemand Essentials service which processes data from 70 million cable set-top boxes including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Cablevision. Most VoD titles consumed (around 90%) were part of free services.
If they can offer a successful DVB-H mobile TV service in Iraq, then surely Europe, where the standard hails from can get more such services off the ground. The Baghdad service launched last month by cellular operator Mobision already has already shipped 10,000 DVB-H handsets, mostly the Samsung T960 and the Italian Quantum pocket TV set. The service offers 20 TV channels for free.
Global IP Solutions (GIPS) said this week it has landed a deal with Hong Kong’s PCCW to use its VideoEngine technology to power a new PC softphone application. It will be used in a new service called 0060 Everywhere. PCCW has one million broadband customers and will use it to offer voice and video calling. GIPS said that PCCW trialled a number of alternative solutions before selecting and implementing GIPS VideoEngine.
Huawei showed off two handsets at CommunicAsia last week, one an Android powered device called the U8230 and the C8000, which runs Windows. Both go on sale in the second half of 2009. The U8230 lets users switch between full and half Qwerty keyboards, has a 3.5 inch touch screen and used the Google Chrome browser.
The French Parliament duly killed many of the provisions of the country’s controversial ‘three-strikes’ law which was supposed to put an end to music and movie piracy there. Instead of cutting off internet supply ISPs have to send warning letters on behalf of copyright holders and then refer them to an independent authority which can order the ISP to temporarily cut internet access, for anything up to a year. A French Court said that to cut off internet access violates free speech and the principle of presumed innocence, so a court must authorize this.
It turns out that Twitter has begun to shrink after months and months of ramping up faster than even Facebook, according to numbers from the Compete service. Twitter reached 19 million monthly visitors and then stopped growing. However each Twitterer is visiting more often and total visits reached 134 million last month, the service said. Other Twitter followers have yet to confirm these numbers.
US DRM specialist Verimatrix said it has its first installation working alongside ZTE in Belarus at Beltelecom, the government owned telecoms operator. Verimatrix VCAS is being used to secure the company’s IPTV and is working with time-shift TV, VoD and parental controls. It is the first time that Verimatrix has worked with the major Chinese systems integrator ZTE and the deal was announced at CommunicAsia 2009.
Parks Associates says that there were 62 million smartphone users in North America in 2008, and that penetration will reach 239 million by 2013. Hold on that’s almost all of the US 280 million predicted cellular customers ‘ are they sure? Parks says that US 3G data plans will reach 95% penetration by 2013, with Canada achieving 70% penetration. As a result mobile advertising is poised to take off. So no-one will want to just use a phone for speaking on? View these numbers with extreme suspicion.
US researcher In-Stat says that web video’s best chance of getting into US living rooms is through the games console. Other devices are digital media adapters, pay TV set top boxes, Blu-ray player and recorders, HDTVs and media center PCs. But right now networked video game consoles are the most used device for bringing web video to the TV and will remain so through 2013, by which time over 10.7 million consoles will be used as Web-to-TV mediation devices in the US.