French IPTV set top company Netgem has proposed to break the company in two, by floating off the separate Videofutur Entertainment by way of a shareholder dividend, where they get €1.36 per share in cash and Videofutur Entertainment stock, which handles business to business IPTV applications, rather than consumer apps.
Cox Communications has officially entered the US wireless market, trialing in three small markets within Virginia, Nebraska and California, initially relying on its MVNO with Sprint, and then build out of its own network over time. The cableco did not announce pricing details, plans or handset partners, and will not do so until it makes a general commercial launch around mid 2010.
Nokia in China has joined forces with New Alliance, an investment arm of Shanghai Alliance Investment, to form a 50/50 joint venture which will offer a range of mobile services in China from local developers. The joint venture company will be called Nokia Alliance Internet Services. It will offer some of the existing Ovi services – as well as work with local content developers to help bring their applications to market and will open for business in January with 80 staff.
News Corp’s MySpace has bought distressed Imeem, a company which offers ad supported music services in the US, paying just $1 million to gain access to its 16 million users, and its suite of mobile applications and services. It will eventually be integrated into the existing MySpace Music offering.
TNS Media Intelligence says that advertising in the US is continuing to fall and that advertising expenditure for the first nine months of 2009 fell by 14.7%. Ad spending during the third quarter of 2009 was down 15.3% versus last year, and this makes it the sixth consecutive quarter of year over year declines. It was last year in the fourth quarter that ad revenues fell off a cliff, so if this continues for another quarter, it will be potentially disastrous for the advertising industry. TNS said ‘The slump has now passed its first anniversary and year-on-year comparisons will become easier in the upcoming months.’ The TNS research showed that cable TV is now taking more of the pie advertising away from broadcast media.
Sigma Designs, the Chinese chip company that is now headquartered in the US in California, has had yet another dramatic fall in its revenue. Its chips go into set tops, home gateways, Blu-ray players, TVs and DVD players, which are clearly not selling so well right now. Revenue for the third quarter was $35.5 million, down by $15.8 million, or 31% from the immediate previous quarter and down $11.3 million, or 24% from this time last year. It made a loss of $2.3 million compared to a net income last year of $4.8 million, but it still has $235.3 million in the bank. Sigma has just bought CopperGate, the chip maker behind HPNA.
Apple confirmed rumors this week to a variety of papers that it has bought online music retailer Lala.com. Lala has a model whereby customers pay 10 cents to buy online listening right to songs for an unlimited number of plays and offers a streaming service. Everyone is assuming that Apple is about to put online streaming into iTunes on the back of the deal. No figures were given for the purchase.
Swiss set top company Advanced Digital Broadcast, said this week it has proved its tru2way set top box can work at pretty much any cable operator. It demonstrated its 4820C HD set top at the CableLabs Interop event, using both Cisco and Motorola tru2way head-ends and CableCARDs.
BT and Cisco said this week they are launching a hosted IP Telephony service for business. BT and Cisco Services will build the underlying infrastructure for service delivery. It will be sold as part of BT’s Onevoice portfolio. Interestingly BT used to have a VoIP service in partnership with Microsoft, so we assume that’s now off. The service is available now in the UK and will shortly be in the US and EMEA, followed by Asia Pacific. The first UK customer is the National Health Service who’s N3 network connects more than 1.3 million UK health sector employees.
At its annual Capital Markets Day in Helsinki, Nokia forecast 10% growth in handsets in 2010, more than redressing losses of the past year.
Nokia will spend 2010 introducing open Symbian and developing Ovi, which it says will generate $2 billion in revenue next year, and it promises no radical U-turns (so it’s not selling off its handset business or dumping Symbian). It is expecting 38% market share in handsets, and will not chase market share at the cost of margins, it says. Downloads of apps from the Ovi Store are growing by 70% a month, says Nokia.
Canadian browser and IPTV software house Espial has announced the newest release of its Evo TV Service platform, which it says now has 3 screen support. It also has personalized advertising, timeshift TV services start over TV, catch up TV and Arabic language support.
Embedded TV browser supplier Oregan Networks says that its new Onyx browser can deliver uninterrupted video streaming natively from the internet to TV sets, resolving QoS issues inside the browser. The new mechanism allows for the unicast video streaming services to be delivered to non-PC consumer electronics in any format, in real time and without the need to buffer or store files on devices, the company claims. Didn’t Adobe already do all that?
AOL shareholders are already selling off shares five days before the company has been spun out. A grey market has appeared for Time Warner shareholders who just want to take the money and be rid of the stock. The company is now valued at $2.6 billion, having shed almost a $1 billion off the corporate value already.
Ruckus Wireless said this week that it has both a US and European Patent on the conversion of multicast to unicast transmissions. Inside its first IPTV wi-fi product it carries out such a conversion on the fly, and buffers the result, so that it can do packet resend requests after the multicast has arrived in the home. It says it has some 35 other patents pending. We find it almost inconceivable that there is no prior art to this.
Amobee Media Systems says that it has delivered a global mobile ad serving and campaign management platform for Telef’nica to operate across all of its 18 global markets encompassing the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, which are already live and serving ads. The Amobee system lets Telef’nica dynamically insert adverts in to all mobile communication channels including mobile internet, applications, games, video, and messaging via, all from a single interface.