Bell Canada has waxed lyrical telling the world that it plans to offer its new Fibe TV Wireless Receiver which lets customers spread the experience to 5 additional TVs anywhere in the home without running cable through the house. What everyone forgot to say is how it has managed this, and this comes down to the Quantenna video capable 4 x 4 MIMO chip that is connected to the home’s broadband router. The device costs $199 or $7 a month in rental. What it did not mention was whether or not it also has a device to transcode for tablets and smartphones ‘ perhaps that’s next. The DVR that comes with the set top seems to support 6 live video streams and 4 recording all at the same time (so 10) and offers pause of live TV on every TV. Bell has 296,000 subscribers and says this service passes 3.3 million now, and 4.3 million by year end.
IPTV enjoyed a surge in all the major regions during 2012, putting on 36% to climb from 56.6 million to 77 million by the year end, according to US research firm MRG. Satellite was the next best performer with solid growth of 12% to 202 million, while cable confounded some predictions by edging up a little to stand at 520 million, still by far the largest sector. The well-publicized but relatively modest cable losses in North America and Europe were more than atoned for by growth in the populous markets of China and India. China also led the IPTV surge to end 2012 on 15.2 million subs by our estimates, having overtaken France to become the biggest IPTV market in 2011. France ended 2012 still a solid second on 13.3 million subs. It looks unlikely IPTV will come close to repeating that growth rate in 2013. Certainly not in recession hit Italy, where according to a study by university Politecnico di Milano, the number of IPTV subscribers slumped in April 2013 alone from 273,000 to 240,000 by the month’s end.
Adara Technologies said this week that it has successfully launched its digital video network system with Darien Communications of Georgia and Beaver Creek Telephone (BCT) of Oregon. This is hosted Switched Digital Video and enables the addition of hundreds of incremental HD channels. Darien Communications has 3,000 subscribers in Southeast Georgia, we’re not sure about Beaver Creek.
US researcher Pyramid Research has a report out identifying the Five driving Factors behind OTT Video in Emerging Markets. It examines growth in Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These are content, technology, partnerships, payments and regulations. No shit Sherlock? It offers case studies on Reliance Communications, Turk Telekom, Rostelecom, Claro and Racsa. It says that the emergence of CDNs means that legacy infrastructure is not a problem, and that a consistent single-digit, megabit-per-second DSL connection is enough to support most video streaming activities.
Telecom Paper says Telefonica says it expects to vote against spinning out Telecom Italia’s fixed access network when the board of directors meets today. Telefonica’s vote controls Telecom Italia.
The HDBaseT Alliance said this week that it has doubled in size in less than a year to more than 60 member companies. In March 2011 it grew by 23 new members, we remember. HDBase T is targeted at replacing HDMI and DisplayPort with a single cable that can deliver power, an internet connection and full HDMI capability at 10 Gbps. It plans to exhibit at InfoComm 2013 next month showing new projectors from Hitachi and NEC, displays from Panasonic and AV receivers from Pioneer which use the technology. Semiconductor company Valens drives a single 100m CAT5e/6 cable, delivering uncompressed high definition 4k video, audio, Internet, control signals and up to 100 watts of power.
French security specialist Inside Secure has announced this week that its SafeZone encryption toolkit has received Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This means it can be used in commercial, government and defense applications in the US and Canada.
Videology, an OTT video advertising platform has completed a $60 million Series D financing round led by Catalyst Investors. Current investors New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners, and Comcast Ventures also participated, along with new investor Pinnacle Ventures. Videology operates in 12 countries and runs advertising campaigns for approximately 900 brands globally and has grown at a CAGR of 190% for the past three years.
UTStarcom is still blaming its underperforming IPTV equipment business for its problems, even though it sold it last quarter, and says it continues to impact earnings. The Chinese based company posted a first quarter operating loss of $3.7 million compared to operating loss of $3.8 million for the corresponding period in 2012 and revenues for the first quarter were $37.2 million, down 20.3% while gross profit was $11.7 million compared to $18.4 million in 2012. The company said the numbers will slowly improve. We’re not so sure.
According to Broadband TV news Telekom Srbija has picked up 25,000 IPTV subscribers in the first five months of the year to end on 200,000 up from 175,000 at the end of 2012. The telco also says it has 16,000 web TV subscribers giving viewers access to video content from the internet.
Broadband TV news also reports that there is increased competition in Romania’s satellite TV market with a new platform delivered by Eutelsat for operator Freesat. It has cheap deals for a monthly subscription with no contract, charging around $30 a month plus a one-off investment in a Viaccess smartcard. It offers most of Romania’s existing TV channels. Romania is one of the most competitive TV markets in the world with 5 million of 6.7 million TV homes taking pay TV, led by RCS&RDS which offers both cable and DTH, and chased by both Liberty Global and Romtelecom now owned by Deutsche Telekom.
Nokia’s Navteq powered mapping service has launched a TPEG assisted, traffic updated personal navigation system called Here in many of the top Russian cities. The first TPEG system was launched in Seoul in South Korea in 2005, and was used to push sales of TDM-B broadcast TV there, which now dominates TV with over 20 million subscribers. TPEG allows a service to change its recommended route based on how long it would take to get you to your destination based on the speed of current traffic, taking into account traffic blackspots and reported events. The data is broadcast to the PNDs, in this case Nokia phones, and routes re-calculated. It is estimated that Moscow drivers spent an extra 127 hours each on the road last year due to traffic. The Here system will launch initially in the 16 largest Cities and then grow to 31 cities in Russia.
Basic Transmissions has launched a new digital terrestrial TV service in Tanzania using Nagra’s MediaAccess smartcards. Nagra claims it has a 60% plus DTT market share globally.
Researcher Analysys Mason says that less than half of smart TV owners have actually connected these TV sets to the Internet. It asked users in five countries in Europe plus the USA. Only one in five respondents who claimed to own a smart TV had actually connected it to the Internet, and less than half planned to. The survey covered 6,600 consumers in France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK and the USA.
France Telecom will officially become Orange on July 1st 2013, so we should all refer to the entire company as Orange from now one. Try to remind us if we slip up.
Alki David, the founder of Internet TV streaming service FilmOn, has said he will remove the major national US broadcast networks from his FilmOn platform rather than go through yet another legal action with them. He has been marketing his own service, based on similar technology to Aereo, as the Aereokiller. A new filing in the Federal District Court in Washington DC against FilmOn and Aereokiller, has come from ABC, NBC and Fox claiming copyright infringement. David said in a published letter, ‘To avoid more inane lawsuits and one that is clearly rigged, we have decided to take down the major broadcasters in Washington DC and replace them with Independent stations. Something we are considering doing all across the country.’
The HomeGrid Forum which support G.hn and the HomePNA Alliance which supports the previous generation HPNA, said this week they would merge to create a single organization focused on promoting advanced wired home networking technologies. The surviving organization will be called the HomeGrid Forum and will have more than 70 members, including 28 Service providers, and some of the largest OEMs, ODMs and retailers in the world.
US advertising specialist BlackArrow, this week announced the availability of BlackArrow Linear, a system for extending linear TV advertising to IP devices. The company also announced collaborations with leading vendors to streamline integrations and technology deployments into IP-based TV infrastructures. Ecosystem partners include encoder designers Elemental, Envivio and RGB Networks as well as transcoding, repackaging and policy management firm SeaWell Networks. The system will offer dynamic Ad Insertion, replication of original broadcast ads within linear streams and alternate content delivery to viewers in certain geographic areas or demographics.
Bloomberg reported that Apple has agreed to pay $53 million to settle a consumer class-action lawsuit under which Apple refused to fixed iPods and iPhones with water damage. Those same consumers can now apply for up to $300 compensation say documents filed in federal court in San Francisco.
CMOS RF tuner specialist MaxLinear said this week that its MxL683 has been selected by STMicro to go in its STiH207 reference design, for a small form factor, low end set-top for Latin America.
YouView says that devices which use Youview have now been purchased by 400,000 UK homes up to the end of March in the UK. More than half of these appear to have gone to TalkTalk which claimed to have shipped 230,000 by end of March, and said it was shipping at the rate of 12,000 a week.
A UK fiber to the home service called Hyperoptic has raised £50 million (around $75 million) led by Quantum Strategic Partners managed by the Soros Fund to allow it to install 1 Gbps fiber in 500,000 homes over the next five years. It installed its first fiber in September 2011. Across Europe, whenever a fiber investor has got into trouble it has been acquired by the local incumbent, which is likely Hyperoptic’s exit plan.