Time Warner Cable said this week it will buy NaviSite for around $230 million, a move which seems to take it further into the enterprise market. Navisite is public and the price of $5.50 a share is a 33% premium on the current share price. NaviSite hosts secure shared applications in the cloud so that businesses can let staff work remotely. Time Warner Cable already has a strong internet offering for business, but it will also acquire 1,200 customers with NaviSite.
The DLNA says that it now has a Software Certification program and Qualcomm’s Skifta says that it has become the first software certified on it. Skifta turns handsets and tablets into remote controls for anything. As far as we know there still is no software certification possible for DTCP-IP, the secure linking service which encrypts commercial content when moving it around the home, although we know there are software versions of it. Skifta bills itself as a media shifting service which lets consumers access their digital media from virtually any source, whether the phone, from the cloud, or remotely from home, but this app is clearly for non-commercial content right now.
Turkey based WiFi specialist AirTies told us that it was raising funds shortly, when we visited it in Istanbul late last year, and now the deal has been closed with US investment firm Invus, the money is being used to expand in Europe. AirTies specializes in adding special firmware to WiFi which allows it to shift HD video around a home, without losing IP packets. The amount of money invested was not stated but it will be between $10 and $20 million.
Nokia’s VC arm Nokia growth Partners has led an investment round which will put $8 million into Voddler, a Scandinavian VoD service. In 2010, Voddler’s first full year of operation, it showed 5 million movies from a growing catalog of 3,500 titles, with content from both international and domestic media majors, to over 850 000 customers throughout Scandinavia. Over 80% of the content on Voddler is ad funded and for free to the consumer.
Engadget says that Amazon is developing a film streaming service to compete directly with Netflix following its full acquisition of LoveFilm. We have said many times in the past that the way in which Netflix gets customers is to say that the streaming is free for existing customers, and Amazon is doing the same by bundling it with its Amazon Prime service – a premium service which guarantees Amazon customers unlimited free shipping in return for a small sign-up fee. We heard this a few weeks back as a rumor, but now a leaked screenshot has shown the offer on the Amazon web site. So it just has to find 20 million subscribers internationally now to match Netflix.
A long time ago we told people to invest in Broadcom, and have backed it since 2003, its current figures show just why the company tends to irresistibly soak up commodity chip markets with revenue for the quarter up 45% over last year to $1.95 billion. Operations generated $452 million of cash and it showed net income of $266 million. This makes it almost a $7 billion company going forwards making $1 billion a year. Revenues for Broadband were up 40% to $2.13 billion, and Infrastructure and Networking was up 50% to $1.59 billion, but he star of the show was Mobile and Wireless, up 68% to $2.9 billion a massive leap of $1.17 billion in a single year.
US cable equipment company Arris says that it has extended a long standing relationship with the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) to supply members with end-to-end broadband access systems through 2011. It suppliers some device types exclusively. The NCTC is made up of 950 member companies, serving over 26.7 million households in the US.
US market research company In-Stat says that North American and European DTH satellite TV set top shipments declined during 2010 down 8%. North America declines are explained away by a shift to residential media servers (multi-room DVRs) led by DirecTV, though this has had less effect in Europe. But why would manufacturers care when India and Latin America are growing at breakneck speed in satellite (email [email protected] for our own latest Latin America Pay TV report)
We have for a few weeks now been expecting names and values to be put to bids for the third largest cableco in Germany, Kabel BW, which has been put up for sale by owner EQT Partners of Sweden. Now Private Equity News tells us that Liberty Global and Kabel Deutschland are both in the running and a price of €3 billion has been mentioned, but we would assume only by eternal optimists. Even the value of €2 billion mentioned back in December appears to be too high, so we’ll await a deal before getting excited over its value.
China’s Commercial Times reckons that Apple will begin building a second-generation iPad in February and a fifth-generation iPhone in May, citing Apple’s suppliers. The iPad2 will initially run a small pilot in February to be delivered in April and then it will go to volume in Q2. The iPhone 5 production will start in May, for a June launch. That’s all very well, but without listing features like does the new iPad have a smaller screen, or does the iPhone 5 have LTE, it makes it all academic.
Broadband TV News says that the dominant French cable company Numericable has put its fairly small Belgian and Luxembourg subsidiaries on the market through Rothschild. It has under 150,000 subs in the Brussels area. The owners of
Numericable are the Carlyle Group, Cinven and Altice private equity groups. Belgacom and Liberty Global’s Telenet are expected to bid, the paper says, which is mad since Belgacom has its own IPTV service using different technology. M7 which runs a small cable operation there is a more likely bidder, but if Telenet bids, it will win.
TNTSat, the French free to air satellite service has reached 2.65 million customers, a number obtained by counting satellite receivers sold at retail. A total of 800,000 new receivers were sold during 2010. Rural parts of France have few other options as digital switch off rolls out in France.
AOL has sold its Surphace content recommendation engine to Outbrain, a provider of similar services, for an undisclosed sum, All Things Digital reports. AOL bought Surphace for $25 million in 2008, but wants to get rid of all non-core businesses.
The Italian IPTV Association has put out its first report on the state of IPTV there and says that Telecom Italia, Fastweb and Wind Telecommunications combined have 700,000 IPTV subscribers. We have Telecom Italia down for around 391,000 in our Pay TV database and Fastweb at around 137,000, so that would leave Wind on something like 174,000, though we weren’t aware of a service there.
French video streaming specialist Anevia said this week that it has a new version of its ViaMotion video server, and it is the first such server that supports WebM live streaming with adaptive bitrate. This is the version which Google is pushing instead of rival streaming systems and relies on the VP8 codec of On2 Technologies which Google acquired in August 2009. The Anevia ViaMotion
Software system has already been deployed with MPEG-2 and H.264 and offers Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming and Microsoft’s IIS Smooth Streaming already.
Swedish VoD server supplier Edgeware, which launched the first system to use lots of inexpensive Flash Memory in VoD servers, says that the Netherlands Teclo KPN has chosen its server technology to be implemented by Nokia Siemens Networks. At last count KPN had just 302,000 IPTV customers. The Edgeware
Ubiquity Multiscreen TV will be used which can offer nPVR as well as VoD function.