Microsoft has leapt in to acquire European price comparison site Greenfield Online paying a whopping $486 million, despite a deal already being in place for the Quadrangle Group to buy the company. Greenfield Online collects consumer attitudes about products and services and offers them up as buying guidance.
Our article last week knocking Alcatel for being one of the last to have a BCAST DRM solution, listed most of the companies that have already demonstrated BCAST but failed to mentioned Irdeto’s efforts in the area, which in June showed support for OMA BCAST in a joint deal with Safenet at a BMCO test camp in Berlin.
If it takes 14 years to make an album, it’s likely to get released onto the internet, and that was what happened to the long-awaited Guns n’Roses ‘Chinese Democracy’ album. However the fan who released the tracks on his blog, has now been arrested. If you’re a fan why would you do that to a favorite band? The perpetrator can now face penalties of up to three years in jail and fines of up to $250,000.
Touch feedback specialist Immersion which in 2002 sued both Microsoft and Sony and upon agreeing a settlement with Microsoft promised to pay some of the money back if it successfully sued anyone else. But when it landed $22 million plus a huge royalty payout of $100 million from Sony, it failed to pay up and Microsoft sued. It has now finally agreed to pay back some $20.7 million to Microsoft. Immersion has 700 issued or pending patents in the US and other countries.
A US court has dismissed a copyright infringement case against Veoh the video hosting site, saying that it could not expect a hosting site to review all videos that were uploaded, but should only respond to a DMCA take down notice, which it did. The complainant was an adult web site, and the decision has implications for the row between YouTube and the $1 billion suit that has been brought by Viacom, in a similar, but perhaps larger, action.
Dilithium has licensed the patents it has which underpin the Media Oriented Negotiation Acceleration MONA, to telecommunications equipment supplier NMS Communications. MONA is a standard for setting up a wireless video session in under one second, making them similar to voice calls. This is the 15th license Dilithium has granted.
PCCW is globally famous for its IPTV service based on a completely componentized approach to content and service delivery, and now it is helping PT Telekomunikasi of Indonesia, the country’s incumbent telco – to launch its own IPTV service. It will be called Telkomvision and services will include IPTV, including IP transactions, as well as DTH broadcasts. Despite a population of 245 million there is only 2% penetration in Indonesia for pay-TV.
French digital TV specialist Metronic will offer a HD set top to the new HD free to air satellite service in the UK, Freesat, and says the devices will be out before the end of the year. So far there has been standard-definition receivers from Grundig and there are plans for a Humax HD DVR, as well as a Panasonic range of plasma TVs with integrated Freesat tuners.
Leading Germany cable operator Kabel Deutschland says that it will cut 300 jobs and outsource its technical service department, taking employees down to 2,750. It reported revenues of €329.2 million for the first quarter and had a profit of €1.7 million, compared to a year-earlier net loss of €4.3 million. But the profit came from an extraordinary item, the sale of a subsidiary, and without it, the loss would have been €11.3 million with ARPU and subscribers still rising, reaching 11 million analog subscribers and just 819,300 digital TV subscribers.
The local awaited merger of UK based transmission companies Arqiva and National Grid Wireless will finally go ahead now that a Competition Commission investigation is complete, being allowed because the two have made undertakings on service pricing which have now been accepted. Previously they were both acquired by Australian banking group Macquarie.
The Batman film The Dark Knight this week became the second largest grossing film ever after Titanic raising $502.4 million in just US takings, according to its distributor Warner Brothers. The film has reached this landmark after just six weeks, a lot faster than Titanic, but US audiences are now tailing off rapidly. Titanic took $600.8 million. Of course higher entrance prices mean that this should be index linked, and that wouldn’t make it quite so impressive.
Leading conditional access company NDS said this week it would provide an EPG system to Tata Sky, the Direct-to-Home service provider in India, the first ever in the Hindi language. NDS has been Tata Sky’s technology partner since its service launch in 2006 and Hindi is spoken by 40% of India’s 1 billion population.
Symbian this week said that it has shipped on a total of 225.9 million units on 249 different phone models and during the past quarter it shipped 19.6 million Symbian driven handsets, up by around 5% over a year ago. Royalty per unit has declined as licensees drift onto v9 of Symbian with a more attractive pricing. It also said that there are 92 phone models in development, up by 48% over a year ago.
The UK free to air satellite service Freesat will have £5 million of TV advertising spent on it in the coming months and has just awarded the contract to develop the campaign to the Farm advertising agency. Until now it has just used a print and poster campaign for the service’s launch.
In the US some companies, including Motorola, Google and Intel are lobbying to get the FCC to free up its White Space spectrum, tiny fragments of spectrum made up of over generous and obsolete guard bands on TV stations, left over from analog days. But some, including Aloha Partners, Qualcomm, CTIA and the Rural Cellular Association are now lobbying the FCC to sell a license to it, once the technology is in place to harvest it without interference. One advisory group wrote a study for Qualcomm which estimated that the US Treasury could make as much as $24 billion from an auction of white-space spectrum. So the spaces between the channels would be more valuable than the channel? That doesn’t sound right.
Nokia has begun shipping its much awaited N96 dual slider handset (which it insists on calling a multimedia computer) with DVB-H live TV, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, which also takes videos at 30 fps, turn-by-turn voice navigation, 16GB of internal memory, superior sound and music through stereo speakers, N-Gage gaming, and a stunning 2.8 inch display. Nokia reckons the retail price will be €550 before taxes and subsidies. In some markets it will come loaded with a blockbuster film. While it may not be the equivalent to the iPhone in terms of touch screen, in terms of revenue, in the run up the Christmas in Europe, it probably is expected to be Nokia’s lead device.