Qualcomm has licensed its modem card to a Taiwanese firm which goes under the name of Foxlink, but is actually called Cheng Uei Precision Industry. The deal is a patent license agreement with royalties paid to Qualcomm for modem cards using CDMA2000, WCDMA and TD-SCDMA standards. Previously Foxlink had licensed the Mirasol display technology from Qualcomm, which is an incredibly low power display technology based entirely on reflective light, instead of backlit or front lit LCD.
Brightcove and AOL announced this week that AOL will adopt the new Brightcove 3 platform for all of its online video content management. In early 2009, AOL and its programming partners will shift to Brightcove to deliver video to the millions of people who visit AOL sites each day an the system will be integrated with AOL’s global advertising system called Platform-A. AOL is a a minority stakeholder in Brightcove.
US research company ABI reckons that some 20% of US households which have analog TV over the air will just let their TVs go dark when the analog signals switch off in February 2009. Of the 111 million households ABI reckons that 15%, around 16.5 million, still use a traditional antenna and that 20% of these, around 3.3 million homes will just let the thing die. Most of rest will buy a digital adaptor and some will upgrade to cable or other Pay TV service.
New CEO of Motorola handsets, Sanjay Jha, the former Qualcomm COO, looks set to bet the farm on Android. This means jobs and resources will be cut around Symbian, and Linux-based or proprietary platforms, plus software tools and applications efforts. This is the last in a long line of operating systems for Motorola which was originally a shareholder in Symbian, then geared up for Linux, then Windows Mobile and then switched back to Symbian. Jha will now make swingeing job cuts and reform the device maker’s supply chain.
Egypt based Mediterranean cellco Orascom has signed up for Nokia handsets which use its Ovi portal. Orascom, expanding rapidly to create a multinational super-carrier in the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean, will offer Ovi across its whole subscriber base. Included in the deal are Nokia Maps, Nokia N-Gage games and music applications. Orascom joins 3, Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Telenor, TIM and Vodafone in supporting Ovi ‘ but they mostly just tolerate Ovi services rather than actively promote them.
Verizon Wireless reported 1.5 million net organic additions to its subscriber base in the third quarter (plus 630,000 from the acquisition of Rural Cellular), and its total now stands at 70.8 million. It was probably the only US carrier not adversely affected by the AT&T deal with the Apple iPhone. Verzion’s churn was up slightly on Q2 but far less than AT&T’s 1.7%, or the even higher levels at Sprint Nextel. Total wireless revenue rose 12.5% to $12.7 billion, ahead of AT&T. This was just over half of Verizon Communications’ total revenues, up 4.1% to $24.75 billion. Group net income rose 31% to $1.67 billion.
Google officially opened its Android Market online store last week, with 50 applications available at launch, all free. From the first quarter of next year, the Market will also support paid-for apps, with developers keeping about 80% of the revenues. Programmers pay a $25 registration fee and then can upload and publish their apps. Google will give the remaining 20% of revenues to carriers, minus billing settlement fees.
US conditional access firm Verimatrix has been issued with a patent for its Videomark user-specific, forensic watermarking technology used in its IPTV system. A second patent, relating to its process of tracking the watermarks , was also recently granted to Verimatrix. Verimatrix goes head to head with arch-rival Widevine which also has watermarking features and which is trying to sue Verimatrix for patent infringements in other technologies.
Vidiator and a local integrator Broaden, said this week they are delivering mobile TV services for Tele2 Sweden. Previously Broaden had developed open-source software to provide streaming for the Tele2 TV service, and will now use Vidiator’s software to stream to wireless devices including its Dynamic Bitrate Adaptation technology.
Irish conditional access company Latens says it has landed a reseller agreement with Motorola which it claims will make Latens CAS the core conditional access system in Motorola’s IPTV ecosystem reference platform. If true and if Motorola pushes it aggressively this could bring Latens lots of business. The reseller agreement includes all Latens CA and Middleware products for IPTV, Cable, Satellite and Terrestrial and cements a strategic relationship between the two companies built through a number of deployments in Scandinavia and the Middle East. However in April this year Widevine said pretty much the same thing, so it looks to us like it’s horses for courses and Motorola will sign a deal with multiple/most CA companies.
Telecom Italia will roll out Alice Casa, a triple play in Italy which has no fixed line rental fees, offers unlimited calls to landlines in Italy, unlimited broadband, and access to Alice Home TV . Subscriptions start at €42 per month which includes a set top and wi-fi router.
Google and the publishing industry announced this week that they have settled their three-year legal battle over the Internet giant’s book search program. Google Print Library Project can go ahead but it will pay $125 million, including about $34.5 million for a nonprofit Book Rights Registry which will store copyright information and coordinate payments. Google will also pay for the millions of copyrighted books already scanned at $60 per complete work to the rights holder and for the legal fees of the Authors Guild and publishing association. Revenue from the program will be split 63% to copyright holders and 37% percent to Google. We’re not sure, but that still looks attractive for having an index of most of the world’s books.