Broadcom said this week that yet again Qualcomm had been found in contempt of court by a federal judge due to it ignoring the injunction awarded against it last December, designed to prevent Qualcomm from continued infringement of two Broadcom patents by bringing certain EV-DO chips into the country. The injunction allowed a sunset period to complete various commitments until the January coming and thereafter a royalty had to be paid. Broadcom says that Qualcomm took on new customers and paid no royalty. The court has told Qualcomm to retrieve the chips and destroy them or pay all the profit it made on them to Broadcom.
Vodafone in Spain is working with the local satellite TV provider Digital Plus in a joint promotion that looks like a Quad play. The bundle is an ADSL and TV package which gives Vodafone free access to the Digital Plus package for the next three months, while Digital Plus subscribers can give their customer free ADSL with no installation costs. A bit like swapping mailing lists really.
In the US a Qualcomm spokesman has come out and admitted that MediaFLO has not (yet) met its expectation and one of the things that the company is exploring is using MediaFLO as a venue for temporary channels as well as live event coverage. MediaFLO in the past said that it would front up and buy top content early next year, but the live event idea still works for us.
JupiterResearch says that only 1% of mobile phone users in the US watch mobile TV and that this figure is going down, not up, because of the poor experiences customer have had with expensive and low quality cellular video. Some 15% of those surveyed said they’d prefer to have the ability to record TV programs on their mobiles to watch later.
Nokia has opened a Nokia Music Store in Italy and has already amassed a catalog of 4 million songs from UMG, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, as well as local and independent labels. Nokia notes that more than 54% of the music that is sold in Italy is local music. Next step we assume is a Comes with Music offering there. The store works with the N85, N78, N95 and the N96 and tracks cost €1 each.
BT’s hybrid IPTV system BT Vision has added 58,000 subscribers this quarter bringing the customer base up to 340,000 homes. It also said that over 83% of customers had bought one of its subscription packs. With BT Vision you can just pay as you go and use VoD only or buy an optional subscription.
Europe’s largest mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse, reported a drop in revenues and profit in the wake of its joint venture with US giant Best Buy. The UK-based company saw its revenues for the first six months drop by 2% to £697 million ($1.05 billion) with an 11% fall in net profit to £44 million ($66 million), but without the Best Buy deal whereby Carphone sold a 50% stake to the US firm EBITDA profit would have seen a huge 51% leap to £112 million.
Google’s lack of support for Flash has been an ongoing concern but this hole, will be rectified from mid-2009 following an agreement between Adobe and Google to put the new version of Flash Player 10 ‘ full blown not just Flash Lite, and optimized for mobile devices ‘ onto Android. This indicates Google’s willingness, in contrast to Apple, to embrace de facto standards rather than reinvent the wheel.
US video chip specialist Zoran has announced highly integrated SupraHD 775 and SupraHD 785 HDTV processors are shipping as 8VSB HD controllers for the US ATSC digital standard. The new SupraHD eliminates multiple components by integrating the TV microcontroller, 8VSB Demodulator, Audio codec, Audio Multiplexer, Analog Video Multiplexer and other functions onto a single-chip.
ABI Research said this week that the global market for set-top boxes will peak at 110 million shipments in 2012, due to the number of digital switchovers that are due that year, and thereafter will go into a gradual decline.
Korea Telecom has added 102,245 subscribers to its new IPTV service ‘MegaTV’ in the third quarter taking it up to 808,101. The system has just gone live with broadcast content through a multicast. In other words until now it has been very fast web TV and now through a change in Korean law it has become IPTV. IPTV revenues for the period are just under $10 million, and KT is selling against a base of 6.7 million broadband subscribers.
US video game revenues were up 18% during October, to $1.31 billion said NPD and attributed the rise to yet more Nintendo’s Wii console sales and the Microsoft Xbox game Fable II which sold 790,000 units. Hardware sales were up 5% to $495 million with the Wii selling sold 803,000 units, the Xbox 371,000 units ahead of the Sony PlayStation 3 with just 190,000. Perhaps in the recession Playstation needs to bring down its price yet again because it had been beating the Xbox in recent months.
Virgin Media will cut its workforce by 15% as part of a restructuring plan which will cut £120 million a year ($180 million) by 2012. Some 2,200 jobs will go, mostly at the end of next year