In-Stat is so keen to come up with a report on mobile App stores that it has come out with one saying that more than 100 million apps store compatible mobile phones will be shipping within five years and this will drive a quadrupling of sales. We would have thought it was far too early to say, and our gut feel is that quadruple could happen in two years. In-Stat said that Smartphones with strong app store orientation will reach 30% of the global smartphone market by 2013, which is where it gets the 100 million units. iPhone users are the most active apps store users so far.
Dreampark the Swedish IPTV middleware provider, has landed its first Irish supplier, no prizes for guessing it is Magnet Networks, which we think might be the only IPTV service in Ireland right now. Dreampark seems to make a habit of kicking out Orca customers, as Magnet used to use Orca’s RightTV, with VoD Servers from Israeli Bitband.
Widevine used the IPTV World Forum in London this week to announce it has a deal with Bulgarian operator Vestitel for protecting IPTV service delivery throughout Bulgaria, using its Cypher IPTV conditional access system. Vestitel provides a hosted IPTV service to regional operators who rebrand the service for their subscribers. Vestitel’s services are currently available to over 100,000 homes in Bulgaria.
EchoStar is declaring from its web site a new deal for customers of IP Prime, the IPTV service distributed by satellite which supplier SES Americom is switching off later this year. This should leave some 65 incumbent US telcos looking for a rival supplier and EchosStar’s ViP-TV clearly thinks that by offering a quick conversion route, it could cash in on the closure. Eagle Broadband already left this business last year through Chapter XI bankruptcy. EchoStar offers some 250 channels to local incumbents.
UK IPTV set top maker Amino Communications, said this week it has a single hardware platform that will support IPTV, VoD and digital signage, the Amino’s AmiNET130 high definition (HD) set-top. Confusingly it has described this as a triple play and has in fact named the product that.
Tripleplay is a fully integrated Amino centric solution for hospitality and enterprise, the company said.
Norwegian encoder firm Appear TV, said that Industria, a solutions partner, has deployed AppearTV’s SC2000 in the Velocity1 project in Wembley. Velocity1 is a full-service TV, telephony and broadband operator jointly owned with the leading UK property developer Quintain Estates & Development plc. Velocity1 launched its first offering at Quintain’s Wembley City, a new development that will comprise approximately 10,000 homes and businesses, and plans to bring the Velocity1 service to hundreds of thousands of UK homes in the coming years.
We still think of ANT as the leading supplier of IPTV browsers despite it launching a variety of initiatives to suggest it is anything but a mere browser supplier. This week at IPTV World Forum it said that it has in fact passed 10 million software units comprising of ANT Fresco and ANT Galio in set tops around the world. Which sounds like it still has at least a 50% market share given that there are supposed to be 20 million IPTV homes this year. Installations include Chunghwa, France Telecom, Hansenet and Telecom Italia and set top partners include ADB, Amino, AVM, Cisco, Coship, Daewoo, HwaCom, HDT, Sagem, Samsung, Telsey and Thomson.
IPTV middleware specialist Orca Interactive now a Viaccess subsidiary, will show its Compass IPTV recommendation system at IPTV World Forum and has now integrated it with recommendations from the Trusted Opinion portal. By incorporating these recommendations for movies, television programs, video-on-demand and other content Orca says that Compass increases the buy-rate and ARPU of a service.
Netflix plans to let its subscribers to share their ratings of Netflix rentals through Facebook and so adds to a frenzied rush from all things digital to link to Facebook. The film ratings will appear on the Facebook pages of Netflix subscribers who opt into the programme, and will link back to movie pages on the Netflix’s site.
US encoder company Harmonic said that Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest telecommunications provider, has deployed a broad range of Harmonic’s content management solutions in support of its Multimedia-on-Demand (MOD) IPTV service expansion. The upgrade will bring Chunghwa customers multi-channel digital mosaics and time-shifted access to major events and programming. In a separate announcement Harmonic said that its Rhozet subsidiary has picked up BT Media and Broadcast as a customer for its universal transcoding technology for its new BT Mosaic service. The idea is to merge the BT workflow service with the transcoder so broadcasters can produce and then deploy online video services from the same system.
Apple iTunes in the US has just begun sourcing HD content, just as rival Amazon has begun doing the same. HD films will be sold for $19.99 rented in HD for $4.99 and will come out as soon as 30 days after theatrical release.
US researcher In-Stat says that what people really want in a digital photo frame, is one which is video capable, which is perhaps why they aren’t selling so well right now. In-Stat also reckons that consumers want Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity as well, so that the photo frame can display stuff stored on a PC or on the internet. Digital photo frames that are used primarily to showcase digital photos in slideshow and they are a growing consumer electronics opportunity says the research firm, but need to support Bluetooth capability, MPEG video files, audio files, and the ability to print pictures directly from the frame. Yeah and we say they just need to be cheaper.
NDS said this week it will supply Cox Communications with a full suite of interactive applications for its tru2way set-tops. Applications will include email, news, sports, weather, games, TV caller ID, movie listings and other information services and will roll out to existing and new Cox customers this summer along with a new Cox user interface, also being implemented by NDS.