Blockbuster got through its re-organization vote which changes all classes of shares into common shares and doing a reverse stock split as part of the company’s plan to comply with the New York Stock Exchange rules on share values. Activist investor Greg Meyer has been added to the board, so perhaps there will be strategic changes ahead.
Eircom in Ireland this week said it would open two trials in ultra fast broadband involving up to 10,000 residential and business customers in County Dublin. FTTH running at up to 150Mbps will be laid and services will be sold on top, with IPTV on the list. The project requires an investment of up to €20 million. and the first customers will be connected by Spring 2011. Back in January 500,000 customers were upgraded to ADSL2+ technology.
E112 (the emergency phone number for Europe) and lawful intercept will drive the Location Based Services market in Europe, which will shortly return to growth, says Berg Insight. The increased adoption of A-GPS will also have a significant effect and annual revenues including A-GPS servers and middleware platforms, will grow from €18 million in 2009 to €35 million in 2015. That seems a very low figure, did we lose some zeroes?
Amazon has announced an update to Kindle for iPad and for the iPhone and iPod touch. It allows readers to get embedded video and audio clips in Kindle books. The first books to take advantage of this new technology, include Rick Steves’ London and Together We Cannot Fail, available at the Kindle store.
According to Rapid TV News, Direct To Home satellite TV is beginning to win the battle for pay TV in Brazil with the National Telecomms Agency saying that DTH penetration rose to 40.6% as cable fell back from 62% market share to May’s 55.3%. In May, pay-TV added 177,349 new subscribers, reaching 8.2 million households, with the terrestrial MMDS TV, only used in this region and no other part of the world we know of, also losing market share. Cable operators there have 4.5 million clients, there are already 3.3 million DTH customers, but only 329,000 MMDS clients.
BT Vision has signed a contract with BSkyB for its Sky Sports channels following the ruling by regulator Ofcom that BSkyB must sell its premium sports content to rivals at lower wholesale prices. The new channels will show on the BT Vision service in late August in time for the new Soccer season and BT promises to undercut its rivals on price at under £20 a month against a wholesale prices of £10.63 per subscriber. So far BT Vision has only 467,000 customers and it thinks this will make a big difference.
3D is now considered ‘hot’ news in the US and researcher In-Stat says that one in five new TV purchases in the US will be 3DTVs in 2013. Year on year unit growth will be 231% between 2010 and 2011, resulting in a doubling of the US installed base of units for 3DTVs from 2010 to 2011. In-Stat says that despite many bright spots in the US CE market, there will be losers in mature segments like MP3 players, handheld games and desktop PCs, showing declining growth rates in 2012 and 2013. But eReader shipments will rise and surge to 20 million by 2013. The data comes from the In-Stat portable entertainment devices service.
US location based social networking group FourSquare has just closed a $20 million Series B investment round with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The 27 strong start up says it has 2 million users now.
In the Netherlands the Dutch public broadcaster (NPO) will test torrent downloads using a P2P network to deliver a catch-up TV service Uitzending Gemist in a six months trial. Programming will be downloaded and can be viewed offline. Originally the BBC in the UK used P2P technology but after struggling with it for about 3 years, shifted to straightforward streaming services.
The European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) says that the digital set-top boxes market will rise 9.6% to €2.2 billion euros this year with units up 6.3% to 32 million. The drivers were listed as new technical trends such as HD and internet integration. It puts France as the fastest growing market with Germany next and Spain and the UK actually shrinking because of digital switchover being already complete to a large extent in those countries.
So goodbye then Move Networks, which burst out of stealth and an investment from Microsoft about two years ago. The company has fired employees and is looking for a buyer, according to NewTeeVee. Move was one of the inventors of adaptive streaming, but now there are so many other companies offering these services. It had built up a customer base including broadcasters such as ABC, Fox, ESPN and Discovery and raised $70 million, with only a small part of that from Microsoft. In April the company acquired pioneering UK IPTV operator Inuk Networks, so we wonder what will happen to Inuk.
Qualcomm has launched App Store software to bring Brew apps and services to consumers in open markets. The first such store will be managed by Sina, the largest infotainment web portal in China. In the past Qualcomm’s obsession with helping operators has meant that most Brew Apps were pre-loaded by operators. Brew is more of an application delivery platform than an actual operating system. This week Qualcomm and AdMarvel also entered the market for in-application advertising and will make it available to developers of Brew Apps which are distributed through these Qualcomm-powered app stores.
AT&T has added Multiview to its U-Verse IPTV service in the US, a way of watching up to four TV programs at once. There is a main program which has audio on and three surrounding it, a perfect way to make sure you miss not one second of the sports game, but want to ignore the build up ‘ just put it on in the background. Personally we think this will be irritating, but worse still, kids will learn to watch four programs at once, defying the couch potato-esque nature of their parents, and then irritatingly keep four screens up all the time. The four channels can be linked to an individual’s favorites channels.
Aspiro, a Norwegian company that makes most of its money offering white label entertainment services to European operators, has sold off its Mobile Entertainment Business to Lobus Mobil in Norway, Sweden and Denmark for $5.4 million with an additional earn-out to come later. This division sells products like ringtones, games and graphics, and will remain a customer of Aspiro going forward which will now focus on its WIMP music service.
Best Buy in the US will launch its own mobile broadband service for laptops in July based on the existing Sprint 3G nework, but not using the Clear WiMAX 4G service. It will call it Best Buy Connect and offer data plans starting at $30 a month for 250 megabytes and $60 a month for up to 5 gigabytes. Sounds expensive to us. At first it will only work with laptops which use Qualcomm’s Gobi chipset, which is an odd decision, but is perhaps because Gobi chips can talk to both CDMA and WCDMA networks which makes them great for roaming. But then again, an awful lot of laptops use Gobi for 3G connectivity anyway, for much the same reason.
Australian incumbent Telco Telstra has cut a deal with the Australian, government owned National Broadband Network, under which it can access Telstra’s access and core network for now and then shift broadband customers over to the new network. The aim is to create a network which reaches 90% of homes with 100 Mbps and the rest with 12 Mbps, a tough proposition in such widely varying terrain and such a sparsely inhabited country. The massive pay off over time will be $9.6 billion (US dollars) in a contentious deal that the opposition government says it will reverse. Approvals will take well into 2011 and it’s deemed uneconomic for any broadband supplier to offer such a network, hence the government intervention.
UK public broadcaster the BBC has been given the go ahead to develop Project Canvas, by its governing body the BBC Trust, after an extensive public consultation. The trust said it will review BBC involvement 12 months after launch. The other stakeholders are Channel 4, Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk, ITV, Five, and BT and media services company Arqiva. First set tops will hit the street before Christmas 2010 which will offer Freeview and internet video, side by side. BBC programs must remain free in the UK, other broadcasters and content owners must be allowed on the platform, says the Trust.
iSuppli and Screen Digest collectively reckon that the US market has been kicked into using phones for video by the World Cup Soccer event with a 12.7% increase in subscriptions during 2010 to 3.5 million. That’s quite odd since MobiTV alone has more subscriptions than that, around 7 million, mostly in the US. Subscribers will reach 5 million by 2014 the report says. Sorry we can’t accept those figures, they’re way too low and what about video that doesn’t require any subscription. Screen Digest said that US subscribers will consume 178.8 million mobile VoD items in 2010, up 31.5% from 135.9 million in 2009.
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has released specifications for BDXL, the new multi-layer recordable Blu-ray disk format, with up to 128GB of capacity. Manufacturers can now obtain licensing information and can start making them. BDXL offers triple layer 100GB RE (rewritable) and R (write-once) discs and quadruple layer 128GB R discs. Possible consumer applications include capture and playback of HD broadcast and satellite programming.
The HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) consortium this week got ETSI approval for version 1.1.1 of its specification in ETSI standard TS 102 796. This has come just as the HbbTV consortium is formed which will set IPR policy, fees, voting procedures and other rules and opened the organization up for wider membership. HbbTV was proposed by a group of European Broadcasters to create a standard way for broadcast and internet video to co-exist side by side in set tops.