A survey at the Telia half of TeliaSonera which has now launched LTE in some locations, says that LTE users work more on a mobile basis, and 23% download larger files to their phones and 19% watch online video and 16% started surfing the internet for the first time. Over 90% of the people who chose to upgrade to LTE devices were already 3G users and 43% already had an iPhone. Finally 54% would not consider a return to 3G. Telia says that 25 locations in Sweden will have LTE coverage by the end of the year.
Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, has written an open letter explaining why he won’t let Adobe Flash onto the iPhone. He suggests it’s a technology issue, and not because Adobe rivals many things that Apple does, citing that it’s a closed system, which is unreliable, lacking in security and has high energy consumption and that it lacks support for touch-based devices. So does that mean that Apple products are open, super secure and low in energy consumption? Come on Steve it’s purely because Adobe threatens Apple’s dominance on online video. Jobs also says that H.264 is a more modern codec, forgetting to mention that a version of Flash supports it. His final point is that Adobe wants to help developers write cross platform apps and he won’t let a third party layer of software come between Apple platforms and his developer community. Now you’re talking. It’s about control. Which is fine, as long as Apple’s not considered dominant, in which case it’s anti-trust.
As we suggested last week, the merger between US operator Qwest Communications and CenturyTel would not be liked by investors, despite our robust opinion that the merger made some kind of sense. Now Qwest has been sued by shareholders looking for more money from the deal and they have asked the courts to step in to stop the merger.
Apple, having bought streaming music service Lala, is about to close it down, drawing widespread suggestions that what is really happening is that the technology and the business model will transfer lock, stock and barrel to an iTunes web subscription service with the same features. The serviced will close down on May 31, five months after the acquisition went through. To fuel that rumor, customers with who advance credits for songs will get back cash or iTunes credits.
US researcher In-Stat says that wi-fi is becoming a must-have feature in digital televisions, Blu-ray players, and portable media players (PMPs) and says that shipments of digital TVs with wi-fi will grow, from under 5 million units in 2009, to 60 million units in 2014. Not only are the unit shipments in digital TVs rising but the attach rate of wi-fi will go up from 4% in 2009 to 33% in 2014. We have to concur. Even if a better technology catches on for delivering video across the home to the TV set, wi-fi is the best way for a TV to interact with the web, so it’s not going away. In-Stat says that wi-fi enabled devices will exceed 200 million units per annum by 2014, but mobile handsets will remain the highest volume wi-fi enabled device throughout the forecast period while internet tablets with wi-fi, including Apple’s IPad, will grow to nearly 50 million unit shipments by 2014.
Reuters (and everyone else) this week is predicting the potential demise of Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, as he faces up to angry investors at this week’s annual shareholder meeting. Reuters cites weak share price and the failure to come up with an answer to the iPhone. Nokia recently said it would not grow profits this year. A lot rides on how the N8, the new top end handset from Nokia and the first with a capacitive touch screen, does in the market, although it is now delayed. Kallasvuo always promised that he would attack the company’s share of the US market, but has failed to deliver there, while rivals LG and Samsung have been incredibly successful. In fact it Nokia had taken their growth in US share, it would have badly dented these two companies.
US set top and home gateway firm Entone said this week that the South Central Rural Telephone Coop has bought its Hydra IP video gateway and Amulet IPTV receiver for its HD IPTV service launch. SCRTC is a regional telco covering parts of Kentucky and has around 30,000 residential and business customers. The Hydra gateway and Amulet receiver enable live TV services throughout a home without new wiring or a set-top box at each TV set.
UK browser firm Ant, which has been making a push to provide the software components of HbbTV, says that it has been selected by German set top maker Kathrein, to deploy HbbTV on a new range of set-tops. Korean firm Intek Digital has also licensed the suite to produce HbbTV set tops, says Ant.
Harmonic announced this week that Digital Cable Systems (DCS), one of Romania’s largest cable and DTH providers, has deployed Harmonic products for its new AKTA digital TV service. It will use the Harmonic ProStream 1000 stream processing platform for re-encoding, multiplexing and scrambling, its bNSG 9000 edgeQAMs for and NMX Digital Service Manager to manage the video network infrastructure. DCS is an existing Harmonic customer.
US DVR pioneer TiVo has just made available a new TiVo Wireless N Network Adapter which it says is designed to help consumers transfer broadband content within the home. It is available for $89.99 at TiVo.com and also at Best Buy stores throughout the US.
While on the subject of TiVo, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business reckons he has established that people with DVRs and specifically with TiVos, don’t fast-forward through nearly as many ads as you might expect. It looks like another one of those University funded cover ups, but the research process says that homes which acquired a TiVo and homes which do not have any kind of a DVR, continue responding to adverts, by buying advertised products. He concludes that there is no reason to change media buying habits just because of DVRs or to dump TV advertising. Yeah Right!
Cable equipment supplier Arris has integrated its ConvergeMedia On Demand Content Management and Distribution system with Clearleap’s web-based content and workflow management suite. The idea is that this makes a perfect way of putting VoD content and advertising together on one system. The two say that a version of the joint solution, is currently on trial with a mid-sized operator in the Mid-west and allows dynamic targeting of local spot advertising in VOD programming.
French digital video specialist Anevia, said this week that e-t’ra has chosen its IPTV and VoD servers to build IPTV services over fiber to the home in the French towns of Toulouse and Albi. e-t’ra is a new generation telecom operator founded in 2000 as a public initiative to raise regional enterprise competitiveness.
The networking division of UK set top specialist Pace has signed Kromtek as its latest Networks Approved Partner from the United Arab Emirates and it will help roll out the Pace MultiDweller distribution platform to Pay TV customers in India. Kromtek will also target hotels in Dubai. The MultiDweller system distributes content over existing co-axial cable without installing new equipment and is aimed at blocks of flats and high rise apartments.
Swedish IPTV middleware company Dreampark has landed its first UK installation providing middleware for the set top boxes which Fibrecity is installing in UK homes to access IPTV and ultra fast broadband. Fibrecity offers residents 100Mbps broadband using city-wide fiber to the home connections.
Deutsche Telekom is thought to be considering investing in US hedge fund Harbinger Capital’s ambitious plan to offer LTE using the Skyterra and Terrestar satellites in the US and their ancillary terrestrial component. T-Mobile could gradually transition from its own 3G network to LTE.
It has taken 28 days, just under a month, for the Apple iPad to sell its first 1 million devices ‘ which Apple says is faster than the first iPhone. Mind you, no-one knew what to expect from the iPhone and it didn’t have the App Store back then. The iPad reached this landmark on Friday says Apple, just as the 3G version went on sale, which we are expecting to be less popular than the wi-fi version. The device is still only on sale in the US.
US cable equipment supplier Arris said this week that it has new models of its Touchstone family of DOCSIS3.0 Embedded Multimedia Terminal Adapters (E-MTAs), Wireless Gateways and Cable Modems. These will all be introduced over the next few months and will be on show at the ANGA in Cologne, Germany this week.
Chinese handset and telecommunications equipment vendor ZTE has joined MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) as an associate member.
ZTE’s main foray into pay TV is with 20 IPTV deployments, most of them in China, but one at BSNL in India. MoCA is currently in a war with less established technologies to dominate home TV connections, especially to support Multi-room DVRs a tIPTV, cable and satellite operators. Adding ZTE will go a long way towards proliferating the standard.
US DRM specialist Verimatrix says that it has installed its Video Content Authority System (VCAS) for DVB Hybrid at Finecom Telecoms, a DVB-C/IP hybrid network in Switzerland. This system combines an IP-based fiber to the home (FTTH) network with its existing DVB-C equipment. to offer a full triple-play called Quickline. Finecom has 200,000 subscribers in Switzerland. Last week Verimatrix called to correct us, and said that although CenturyTel had previously used Widevine for its DRM, as we stated in an article last week, it was now an established customer of Verimatrix for the past two years. Apologies – somehow we missed that.
UK private equity firm Terra Firma, which owns record label EMI, has secured commitment from its investors for $159 million to cover a loan payment due to Citigroup, to prevent a takeover by the lender who helped finance its acquisition of EMI. But EMI remains precarious at best and will surely end up being broken up or sold or both. The money is for interest payments on $4.6 billion of debt borrowed to acquire the business.
Media measurement firm Nielsen said this week it has acquired GlanceGuide, a provider of video analytics but has not released financial terms of the deal. GlanceGuide attempts to measure how engaged or attentive viewers are when viewing video, aggregating things like viewing duration, video visibility and audio volume to determine a measure of attentiveness. Nielsen talks about including the technology to build a single system for audience measurement and advertising effectiveness.’
Google will begin selling e-books this summer from a new service called Google Editions, says that Wall Street Journal. The service will work with a range of reader devices and publishers will be able to set up versions of Google Editions on their sites, and retain the “bulk of the revenue” from sales.