US researcher IMS says that the GPS chip market will grow to $200 million during 2009 as it penetrates into a range of vertical markets, such as cameras, laptops, sporting equipment and first responder radios. This will help to drive shipment growth of 25% year-on-year and then lead to a compound annual growth rate of 21% for GPS chips between 2008 and 2013.
US TV network CBS says it will put more of its current TV shows out over its TV.com portal, to keep up with sites like Hulu. The New York Times says that it will announce new deals with PBS, Sony, MGM and Endemol to add other content. CBS bought the TV.com site when it acquired CNET last year, which will now also include CBS classics.
Starz Entertainment has extended its deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment, under which Starz gets the exclusive pay TV rights to all Sony Pictures theatrical releases. The deal is said to be multi-year and should last at least into 2013 and now broadens to include a variety of Starz platforms. The company will also gain behind the scene film shoots with the stars of the films.
It’s been so long since we heard from them, that we had almost forgotten about innovative set top software designer Digeo, which this week says it has HD version of its famous Moxi HD cable set-top box. Instead of marketing this device only to cable operators, the Pall Allen funded company will begin to sell directly to end user. The Moxi has a 500 gigabyte hard drive and can hold up to 75 hours of recordings at full 1080 resolution.
Spanish broadband over power chipset builder DS2 said at CES that Corinex Communications, will use DS2’s 200Mbps Aitana chipset in its HomeNet, product designed to connect PC’s IP cameras, media players and other entertainment and networking devices to the home network. HomeNet is available in both powerline and coax versions.
Circuit City Stores, the consumer electronics retailer, is now inviting bidders to buy its business or its assets out of Chapter XI. So far US newspapers have reported interest only from liquidators, but there are rumors that Wal-Mart and the Mexican electronics retailer Grupo Elektra, are also interested.
We must say we are impressed at how swiftly Yahoo has managed to find a new CEO, with Jerry Yang only saying he would stand down in mid-November and this week Carol Bartz ex-CEO of Autodesk being named as the new boss as of now. This is like coming out of retirement for her, as she was most recently executive chairman of Autodesk, a company she was responsible for running for 14 years. During that time it is a testament to her strategy that Autodesk grew revenues from under $300 million to $1.5 billion, and the company’s share price increased nearly ten-fold. She has also worked at Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment and 3M. We’ve not heard a bad word said about her, but the Yahoo job will require stamina, an ability to fight at close quarters, including against the board, and to find way to wake up a company that sometimes appears moribund. Bartz is on the board at Cisco, Intel and NetApp.
Cablevision is now in its third year of trying to shake off a copyright action to allow it to offer its, so called, Remote Storage-DVR which most people call a network DVR. Now the case it to make it into the US Supreme Court. The Court’s first act was to ask the US Department of Justice what the government’s views are before getting started on forming it own. All of cable and IPTV world is waiting to see the final outcome, which has gone against Cablevision in lower courts, each of them ready with their own services if the New York cable operators wins out.
You couldn’t make this stuff up. There is genuine drama over the plans of US actors represented by the Screen Actors Guild and whether or not they go on strike. In fact they are so keen to turn a drama into a crisis that after a two day meeting, during which the chief negotiator with the studios survived a vote to have him removed, they only managed to decide that yes, they would ask their members if they wanted to strike. Unfortunately they couldn’t agree on WHEN to send out ballot papers, due to huge stalling tactics from both sides of a divided union. At one stage they took hours to decide if they could extend the meeting by a few hours. With such a coherent show of strength we bet the studios are quaking in their shoes. The dispute is over, as always, how to share new revenues like internet advertising.
While Intel Atom is leading the early netbook charge, its challengers, including Qualcomm, are mainly supporting designs based on the ARM processor, and Freescale is prominent among these. The former Motorola chip unit announced last year that it would move out of cellphone basebands and focus its wireless efforts on low power technologies and has a new ARM Linux-based processor, the i.MX51 system-on-chip, which costs under $20, which should lead to netbook pricing at under $200, the company says. This compares with $60 for an Intel Atom processor plus separate power management and the costs of Windows XP which keeps netbook prices at $350 or more. Freescale’s reference netbook design is available now.