YouTube and Viacom have at least agreed how they will go about the process of handing over customer data is their $1 billion copyright case. Google will cut identifying information such as name, address and IP number from the record. The data was ordered to be offered to Viacom by a US judge in their copyright trial.
If any country has a bigger vested interest to support consumer electronics device makers ahead of copyright holders, then it’s Japan, and it has duly dropped from pending legislation the introduction of a levy on devices such as MP3 players, widely referred to as an iPod tax. It would have resulted in payment of just a few percent of the device value as a levy for recording companies and songwriters. The Agency for Cultural Affairs has decided not to submit the legislation after huge criticism from the consumer electronics lobby.
Dutch cable TV operators are going to be treated just like Telcos in the Netherlands, and will have to allow rivals to wholesale their entire service and be able to resell TV subscriptions and broadband access, if a ruling by the Dutch telecoms regulator OPTA is upheld. OPTA reckons the telco TV efforts are not enough to put competitive pressure on the leading cable operators UPC and Ziggo.
The nth round of haggling between Microsoft and Yahoo transpired this week with Yahoo rejecting a bid for Microsoft to buy its search business. Activist investors and Yahoo are still headed for a showdown on August 1st when a motion to replace much of the board and enter a deal with Microsoft, is going to be presented by Carl Icahn.
Iliad, the owner of the French ISP Free, has completed negotiations to borrow $1.6 billion, much of it to pay for Alice France, which it is buying from Alice’s parent Telecom Italia. Iliad has been in exclusive talks for weeks with Alice, which has around 900,000 subscribers. Meanwhile French researcher MediaCabSat reckons that IPTV in France has already overtaken cable, with 8.5 million viewers compared to 6 million for cable. Does France really have 8.5 million IPV customers, we can only track 4.5 million among the top three suppliers and most researchers only have 8.4 million in Europe, so perhaps not.
Telegent, the US chip company that makes chips which pick up analog TV for inclusion in handsets, says that the Chinese are going mad for handsets with them in, during the run up to the Olympics. A market research firm called Sino MR said that 71% of consumers there are interested in watching the 2008 Beijing games on a TV phone, and 41% are considering buying one. Sino MR said that free-to-air analog TV handsets will exceed 21 million by year-end, which will be way more, by several orders of magnitude, than digital Mobile TV devices ‘ if that actually comes to pass.
According to Broadband TV News the allocation of spectrum for the Polish DVB-H service has been held up because negotiations are continuing with neighboring countries, specifically Russia, over which parts of the UHF spectrum to use. However the Office of Electronic Communications there says that a DVB-H service, covering 31 cities, will be ready at the beginning of next year and that the tender process will begin any day.
UK analog TV homes fell by 34% in the year to the end of March, according to regulator Ofcom, which suggests that the number of households with no digital TV is now down to 3.3 million out of a total of 22 million that have TVs, around 1.7 million less than a year ago.
US chipmaker LSI said that it will offer content processing solutions for the Microsoft Silverlight web video platform. The Tarari chip will offer video acceleration to enhance Silverlight in devices running variety of Microsoft operating systems as well as on Linux and the Mac OS. The company claims a technology which it calls deep frame inspection which examines each frame of video to calculate what has changed from the previous frame gives a compressed video stream which it says enables richer video formats to be streamed over the Internet.
Velocix has announced deals with week with two of the major legal P2P video networks Rawflow and Kontiki. The deal with UK company Rawflow means that it will take an exclusive license for RawFlow’s P2P Streaming technology and have sole responsibility for selling and supporting its Intelligent Content Delivery (ICD) system. Velocix will also offer a major hosting facility for Kontiki as its preferred CDN partner and has launched its own P2P+ product to provide global delivery services for
video, software and games over the Internet.
Viacom has had to cancel a $450 million piece of debt funding from Deutsche Bank, in favor of subsidiary Paramount, which was supposed to be used for the studio to make films over the next three years, because the debt terms were getting worse by the day. Instead Paramount will source the funds internally, though it might mean that it ends up making less films. The credit crunch in the US may mean that content funding generally faces something of a slowdown over the next year or so.
The FCC chairman Kevin Martin said this week that he will not recommend a fine against Comcast, despite the fact that he is adamant that the cable operator had hindered several internet applications in against the FCC’s expressed policy. Martin said at a press conference this week that he found Comcast’s broadband network management practices to be in violation of the FCC’s policy principles and that he would make an order telling them to stop, but not issue a fine. Comcast recently entered into agreements with BitTorrent, Pando Networks and Vonage which presumably means that a change of heart has already happened.