The Singapore White Spaces Pilot Group (SWSPG) this week said it had a further 9 new members and a number of new locations for White Spaces pilots in Singapore to go with those it launched last September. It made the announcements to kick off the inaugural Global Summit on TV White Spaces held at the Singapore Island Country Club. The new commercial pilots are conducted under a test license from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and use a location database for Singapore from Microsoft. The new locations are mostly resort buildings and open spaces and one offers video surveillance for rooftops while another extends an enterprise network to new offices. New members include Grid Communications; Terrabit Networks; the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT); the Eurokars Group; Sentosa Development Corporation; HDB, a public housing authority ; NexWave, a regional provider of network services; iconectiv, part of Telcordia and ST Electronics.
The Astrium built Alphasat I-XL satellite, commissioned in 2007 by Inmarsat, will be launched at the end of July. It claims to be the most sophisticated communications satellite ever put into orbit, with 8 new generation digital signal processors, an 11 meter antenna reflector, and a 40 meter solar array which will generate over 12kW of power. It was delivered on the European Alphabus satellite launch platform. It will be used to offer broadband direct to home, in EMEA and will offer some services in extended L-band spectrum to mobile customers. It will also offer public safety services and communications for the maritime and aeronautical communities.
US researcher Digital TV Research says that based on forecasts in 97 countries, DTH revenues will overtake cable TV revenues during 2013. That would be important if it wasn’t obvious that cable TV revenues are only falling because its broadband is so profitable, and that’s where it invests all of its money. Revenues for subscription fees and VoD payments will rise to $203 billion in 2018, up by $19 billion on 2012. Total growth in 2013 will be just 3.2%. DTH will account for 45.9% of the total in 2013, rising to 47.6% by 2018. Cable will drop from 45.9% in 2013 to 40.7%. IPTV ‘ the fastest growing platform ‘ will climb from 7.5% in 2013 to 10.5% by 2018.
The communications regulator in the UK, Ofcom, has decided once again to investigate Sky, once again over its sports channels. Ofcom has made it clear in the past that it cannot use these channels to blackmail everyone into buying the Sky service and instead must make wholesale deals, at regulated prices, with other platforms. This is because Sky, controlled by News Corp, has a monopoly on a number of key sports. Now British Telecom has its own sports channels, Sky is being accused of telling BT it cannot have Sky Sports, unless it gets access to BT Sport. Regulators only do this to prevent tying (between channels and pay TV services), and only when there is near monopoly status, and if it is doing this, Sky knows perfectly well and is simply chancing its arm. Sky says the complaint is without merit.
Video publishing start up Ooyala says its Global Video Index shows that mobile and tablet video make up 10% of all online video, more than double the 4% it accounted for in Q1 2012. Mobile and tablet video viewers spent over half this time watching long-form videos and Q1 2013 was the first quarter that mobile (53%) and tablets (52%) beat desktop PCs (38%) in percentage of time spent watching long-form video. In Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, viewers watch live video 20 times longer than on-demand video across all device types. This is because there IS live video, in broadcast format in those regions. Singapore leads the region, with an average live viewing session of 52 minutes. Ooyala has also announced plans to open a new R&D center in Singapore.
Luxembourg satellite owner SES announced today that Thailand’s IPMTV has contracted additional capacity on its SES-8 satellite and has renewed its multi-year capacity deal on NSS-6. SES-8 is expected to be launched later in 2013 and will be co-located with NSS-6 at the prime orbital location of 95 degrees East. The expanded capacity will enable IPMTV, an established satellite TV provider, to double the content reach to its 4 million households in Thailand by the end of the year. It currently broadcasts over 150 local channels to its subscribers, with 21 in HD. SES has also signed another expansion contract with MediaScape in the Philippines, and its Cignal Digital TV service which offers 22 HD and 65SD channels to 500,000 homes in the Philippines.
Dish Network in the US has more or less been forced to pull out of the hunt to buy the 3rd largest cellular operator there, Sprint-Nextel, but says that because it has terminated due diligence and added extreme deal protections in the new agreed deal with Japan’s SoftBank, it makes it impracticable for Dish to continuing bidding. It will now focus on trying to buy control of Clearwire from the shareholders who own around half the shares of Clearwire that Sprint doesn’t own. This is a transaction that Sprint is now suing Dish over, because it wants to buy Clearwire too. If Dish is left high and dry this could leave it with a major headache looking for a partner for its cellular spectrum, and that could change the face of pay TV in the US.
WFOR-TV which is a CBS affiliate TV station operating in Miami, Florida, said that it is now broadcasting a mobile signal using ATSC M/H which uses the Dyle mobile TV brand. The company is selling accessories which turn existing mobile devices into portable TV’s, taking in the broadcast signal and transferring it to the phone. These include Belkin’s Dyle receiver and Elgato’s EyeTV Mobile TV Tuner accessory. MetroPCS offers the Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G Android smartphone, which comes preloaded with the Dyle mobile TV app.
Amazon has launched Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, bringing together a collection of content including books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows into a single, unlimited, easy-to-use service for kids ages 3-8. It will include popular titles from Disney, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment and Electronic Arts.
CableLabs, the R&D arm of the US cable companies, has announced a list of devices which have qualified for version 1.0 of the DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON (DPoE) specifications, allowing Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) technology to be part of a cable TV network, targeted at business customers. Devices achieving qualification status came from CommScope, Huawei, Sumitomo Electric and ZTE and optical network units (ONUs) from CTDI, Finisar, Huawei, and Sumitomo Electric.
Nook Media, the eReader and tablet subsidiary of Barnes & Noble cut the entry level price of its Nook HD and HD+ tablets for Father’s day, down to $129 and $149 respectively. But now Father’s day is over, the prices have remained, leading to much speculation about whether or not this is a firesale, to clear the decks of tablets and get the company back to pure eReaders. It has also dropped support for the Mac and PC (pre Windows 8) versions of the Nook reader software, and now directs users to the web-based version instead.
French encoder maker Ateme has announced that the Asia Broadcasting Television Company (ABtv) from Thailand has chosen the Ateme Titan Live to provide premium and sports content broadcasting services throughout Thailand. The company was known for its cable service through subsidiary CTH which already has 2.5 million subscribers, but can now also deliver via satellite where it has no cable. The new DTH service will go live this month, and include English soccer, and 120 SD and 30 HD channels.
Multimedia Research Group says pay TV subscriber homes have now passed 800 million, out of 1.42 billion total TV homes in the world this represents 55% penetration. So far so good, but then MRG says that cable TV holds the largest chunk of the market at 63%. We think this figures is a little suspect. Further up the page we have a report saying that revenue from Cable is 46% now and falling, so we’re not sure that a per home split would be so far off. The US might have that kind of ratio, but we can say categorically that the EU is only about 40% cable, and Latin America is 53% and falling.
Halon, a US equipment provider to hosting companies, has an interesting Security Survey, which asked 2,084 US 18+ people about cloud security. Over three-quarters (76%) have concerns about storing music, photos and files in the cloud. Some 94% say they do not trust unknown emails either. People are most concerned about losing files, others having access to those files and losing control of those files if they were stored in the cloud. 21% of people worry they would get infected with viruses. The survey also reveals that 25% of Americans do not understand what the cloud is. Well we have never understood it, we used to simply call it the internet. 13% believe that companies which hold files in the cloud cannot be trusted. In total 79% of Americans say they would never feel comfortable saving any type of file in the cloud, until it has Proof of security (54%), from a trusted company (44%), and they know physically where the files are (34%).
Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled The Shift Plan, a project to reposition it from a general telecom equipment supplier to a specialist in IP networks and ultra-high speed fixed and mobile broadband. Under the plan, ultra-broadband access and IP networking will account for 85% of the company’s R&D investment by 2015. IT wants to grow core networking revenues by 15% to over €7 billion in 2015, and the access market will generate €250 million in operating cash flow, up from €115 million cash negative in 2012. The company has also targeted €1 billion in fixed cost savings and asset sales and debt reduction of €2 billion. OK it has its wish list and we can all hold it to that in future.
Four months after Sony announced the PlayStation 4, it showed what it looks like this week and priced it at $399, $100 less than Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox. Sony said it would be available in time for the holiday shopping season. It also said the PlayStation Network service PlayStation Plus will be available on the PS4 for the same $49.99 per year. Xbox One is coming on November 21 priced at $499 including the new Kinect motion sensor.
US encoder maker Harmonic, this week announced linear ad splicing capabilities for its ProStream 9100 real-time stream processor, to let service providers and broadcasters insert targeted local and regional advertisements into broadcast programming. We fail to see how it sold any of these without this.
Broadband TV News says that Liberty Global in the Netherlands has postponed the highly publicized firmware upgrade for its Horizon set-top. No new date has been set for its delivery and Liberty will be getting desperate due to the high complaint calls rates we have published and the fact it has launched it now in other markets. Customers are especially worried about the speed and stability of the UI. There are about 155,000 Horizon devices shipped so far in the Netherlands, its first market and the company has stopped shipping it automatically with all top end orders.
The Modern Times Group which runs the Viasat DTH satellite service in Scandinavia, said this week it will terminate registration of its shares in the US and eliminate its reporting obligations. MTG will remain listed in Sweden.
Apple said this week that HBO GO and WatchESPN are now available directly on Apple TV. It also said that iTunes users have downloaded one billion TV episodes and 380 million movies and purchase over 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies per day. Content availability will vary by country, Apple said.