The UK Competition Commission has pointed out what appeared obvious from the start, that the video project that would merge existing broadcast content from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 on a new online player, called Project Kangaroo, would restrict competition. Similar to the BBC iPlayer which has captured tens of millions of customers, Kangaroo was to include content from the top UK broadcast channels. The proposed remedy is that the content is also made available to alternative platforms.
Apparently US bank Goldman Sachs, which owns a big chunk of shares in Sanyo, has walked away from acquisition negotiations with Panasonic saying that Panasonic has no intention of buying all the stock and the price being offered is too low. Someone wants to tell them the story of the Yahoo who cried Wolf too much? Goldman Sachs, Daiwa Securities and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial hold a majority of Sanyo shares.
A spokesman for Sony’s US electronics group has stood up and said that sales of consumer electronics goods in the US would get nowhere near recent forecasts from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) which pitched them at about 3.5% up. While there were bright spots and Sony highlighted its Alpha digital single lens reflex cameras, Blu-ray players and Bravia flat-panel HDTVs, the company pointed out that prices have fallen in every category.
News Corp’s US studio Twentieth Century Fox this week said it had signed a deal with the BT Vision IPTV service to have access to a range of its movies. At launch in December 2006 BT Vision only had 1,000 films, but planned to grow this to at least 5,000 through deals with Disney, Warner and Paramount. There were no deals with 20th Century Fox or Sony Pictures. Sony has still not signed up.
Forrester Research issued an estimate this week that digital music sales account for 18% of total music sales in the US and says it will grow to 41% of the total by 2013. The report said that 55% of people expect to pay to download music by then. However throughout this period Forrester doesn’t expect the record labels to replace the losses in CD sales and the entire business will shrink from $10.2 billion now to $9.8 billion by 2013. Forrester says that music delivered to handsets will reach no more than $300 million in 2013. It may be right, but we would bet that a far higher proportion will be delivered on phones outside of the US.
EchoStar has cut a deal with MVS Comunicaciones, a Mexican telecommunications conglomerate, to create Dish Mexico to launch a satellite TV service nationwide. EchoStar will provided the satellite capacity plus TV equipment, including a 20-inch satellite receiver, remote control and the NagraStar secure conditional access system. MVS will throw its existing MASTV service with over 570,000 customers into the venture.
Texas Instruments gave the nascent femtocell market a major endorsement this week when it made its first public announcement of a product for miniature base stations. The DSP giant had previously been sitting firmly on the fence about femtocells, but now becomes the first major to show its hand. The new TCI6484 is not specifically designed for femtocells and can be used for any size of base station, and can support all the 2G and 3G wireless standards plus LTE and WiMAX. The company says it will have a bill of materials of about $200, which is a far cry from the $100 purchase price that operators are demanding for wide scale deployments.
Wi-Fi specialist on moving transport Icomera of Sweden has tied up with FirstGroup, the UK’s largest bus and coach operator, to put free Wi-Fi access on the RailAir coach service linking Heathrow Airport with Reading. The fleet of RailAir coaches has been equipped with the Icomera Moovbox M Series mobile broadband gateway which offers Internet access to passengers throughout the 50-minute journey at download speeds of around 2 Mbps.
The two French mobile operators SFR and Bouygues, are sitting on the mobile TV fence, much the same as market leader Orange, and have expressed reservations on the economical viability of DVB-H TV in France. Orange last month said that the broadcasters expected the mobile operators to pay for everything, and that this was unacceptable when it had no say in what the content would be for the system. The second and third largest cellcos wrote to the companies which own the sixteen government selected mobile TV channels saying they were uncomfortable putting money into the project. Until the two sides agree, France like many other countries, has no way forward on a DVB-H network.
The Microsoft and Yahoo rumors won’t die, and this time the UK Times has said that Microsoft will offer $20 billion to buy Yahoo Search. In a complicated deal that may have some basis in truth, but clearly is not yet fully unearthed, Microsoft would put up $5 billion and former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller would match this with money raised from backers. People are denying the deal exists at all, but clearly interested parties are bashing their brains out trying to work out a compromise which will see Yahoo end up all or in part owned by Microsoft. Meanwhile billionaire activist investor Carl Ichan has upped his stake in Yahoo to just under 5%.
Sumner Redstone has finally given up the ghost on his ownership in Midway Games, an asset he has held on to grimly for some years, selling his 87% stake to investor Mark Thomas for a song, in the process crystallizing a loss of $800 million. However Thomas will also take on the $70 million of debt that the company held, reducing Redstone’s personal liability somewhat. But we suspect that’s not the last we have heard of Redstone asset disposals.
Joost, the P2P video network, said this week that it had a client version for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. The application is free and can be downloaded through Apple’s App Store. Joost offers 46,000 videos including 18,000 music videos, 400 TV series and 1,200 movies and short films.
TiVo is trying to export that famous TiVo experience to the handset, through connection to a free mobile phone-optimized web site which allows subscribers and non-subscribers alike to browse, search, and discover television shows, regardless of mobile platform, carrier or browser. The site can be accessed with any Internet-enabled phone through any network, opening up the service to millions and millions of cell phone owners and is located at m.tivo.com.
Singapore has closed down its TV2Go mobile TV trial which uses DVB-H and operator Singapore Digital said it is now ‘looking forward’ to the regulator’s plans for licenses, expected early in 2009. Singapore is one of the countries that is actually expected to build a DVB-H network, because of its small size and the ease with which the whole area can be reached with a handful of transmitters. TV2Go has been running for 18 months, free to anyone in Singapore with a DVB-H enabled handset.
Broadcom’s win at a District Court level when Qualcomm last year accused it of infringement of its own intellectual property got a tiny setback this week, as the court of Appeals sent the matter back to the District to further refine. The District Court’s initial statement said that by deliberately misleading the standards body for H.264 Qualcomm had given up its rights to the patents. This is now thought to be incorrect, and some form of wording must be agreed which only says that the patents are unenforceable when applied to H.264 products not other non-standard products. It’s a miniscule win for Qualcomm, and we can’t see how it materially affects the multiple disputes between the two US chip makers.
Sling Media has launched a web site at Sling.com which uses much of the same content as Hulu, licensed from the same content companies. Sling users will also be able to use the site to view live content from their Sling Boxes, at home using their existing passwords.