Swiss set top maker Advanced Digital Broadcast said this week that it has signed a deal with the UK’s Top Up TV to supply its i-CAN Easy HD DVB-T2 set-top. DVB-T2 signals are being used on a single multiplex in the UK to deliver free to air HD programming. The ADB device can also link viewers over the internet to the BBC iPlayer’s catch-up content. ADB says its device is the only box in the UK which can give access to the premium sports channels from Sky and ESPN, though it doesn’t say why, perhaps this is because these streams are encrypted, and it has room for a set top smart card.
The company behind the magicJack, the Internet phone gadget heavily advertised on US TV says it is offering free phone calls from computers, smartphones and iPads to any phone in the US. There are already programs which allow free calling between computers such as Skype and Google Voice but you need a cellphone and these use up data minutes. MagicTalk would go one better by eliminating fees for calling landline and cell phones in the US and Canada, with no time limits on the calls.
The software will be available next week for Windows and Mac computers. Versions for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android phones will follow in September or October.
Somehow IGA Worldwide, the in-game advertising network, has managed to attract investors for a new round of funding led by T-Mobile’s T-Venture Funds with participation from previous backers Kreos Capital and Easton Capital. It must have been a bitter negotiation. IGA put itself up for sale in March as it had two quarters where revenue had badly fallen away. Prior to that IGA had investment of around $46 million and had adverts in around 22 video game titles and a wide-ranging exclusive deals with EA Games and Activision. But sales were rumored to go as low as $3 million in 2008, while its burn rate was about 4 times that. IGA since has cut costs and now has only 45 employees. The amount invested in this round has not been given but we’re sure the execs there are now familiar with cute little VC term ‘price protection,’ we will have decimated their holdings.
US researcher Juniper Research says that mobile banking services will generate almost 90 billion text messages every year by 2015, up from 30 billion this year. It looks like that alone will make it financially worthwhile for cellular networks to stimulate banks to add that kind of capability. Juniper says this equates to one message every 2 days per person using such systems, usually alerting them to spending or balance thresholds, and its says there is considerable scope for banks to offer new messaging based services on top of basic balance alerts.
UK based RF chip specialist Mirics, best known for its FlexiTV which adds broadcast TV to a PC by using a cheap radio chip and the PC processor decoding the digital TV signal, has launched a version for Brazil and Latin America, where ISDB-T is the predominant standard. It can pick up both 1 Seg (low power for mobile TV) and Full-Seg (for TVs). Mirics says it has selected OCPtech, a specialist sales and marketing company, to represent the company locally. Mirics and OCP have established relationships with multiple ODM partners, including Digibest, USmart, Costar and the US’s Hauppauge Computer Works.
Intel says it will issue an update to the Atom line designed for home and small business storage appliances. Since Intel’s initial foray in this area in March, a number of storage vendors including Acer, Cisco, LaCie, LG Electronics, Netgear, QNAP, Super Micro, Synology and Thecus have adopted the Atom cpu-based platform in products available now. Intel is now introducing a 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor D425 single-core and D525 dual-core which will boost performance with higher CPU frequencies for faster storage processing. These are paired with the Intel 82801 IR I/O Controller and both additions support both Windows and Linux operating systems.
US cable equipment vendor Arris said this week that Korean cable services provider CJ HelloVision has signed up for Arris Cable Modem Termination Systems for DOCSIS 3.0 delivering data and voice over IP. CJ HelloVision is a part of the CJ Group of companies, and serves nearly three million cable homes.
Texas Instruments says that it has new DaVinci DM37x video processors which use the 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 cpu and an 800MHz C64x+ DSP. The chips can cope with 720p HD video, which means an increase of 50% in ARM performance and a 40 percent increase in DSP performance. Putting it another way TI says this is double the graphics power with 40% less power consumption, when compared to its top end OMAP 3 devices. The chips cost $25.60 in 1,000 unit sample quantities and are available now.
US researcher In-Stat says that Web-to-TV video is happening faster than most people expected and that by 2014, there will be 57 million US broadband households viewing full-length online video on the TV. This will drive overall revenues of $17 billion from $2 billion today. This is one market where we think the market forecasters are undershooting by quite a margin. In-Stat adds that installed web-enabled consumer video devices will shoot from 70 million in 2009 to 237 million in 2014. The market will also eat up 11 million hybrid STBs.
The latest report from Pew Internet and American Life Project says that in the US, internet usage has temporarily leveled out. Two-thirds of Americans currently use broadband at home, about the same as the 63% that a Pew study found in 2009. Either the US is reaching its broadband peak, unlikely, or the economic malaise is slowing down broadband’s growth. A third possibility is that those who don’t have broadband at home have not yet discovered the wonders and warts of the Web. Pew also found that 53% of the people it surveyed do not believe the government should not make it a priority to get affordable broadband for everyone. But surely that’s because at least 33% of them don’t know what they are missing.
Google has cut an advertising sales deal with DirecTV so that it can use its usual swashbuckling auction style of advertising sales to bolster DirecTV revenue on 11 TV channels. The move is described as a strategic partnership and adds another almost 19 million homes to bring Google TV ads to around 30 million homes. Google will sell DirecTV ad inventory on Bloomberg, Fox Business, Centric, Fuel, G4, Current, Ovation, Fit, Sleuth, Chiller and TV Guide at any tome of day including prime time. This is only 11 out of 130 TV channels, so it’s more of a taster than a strategic deal, as yet.
The largest disk drive market in the world in the form of Seagate Technology and the world’s leader in the production of Flash memory, Samsung, have decided to get together to jointly develop a single controller for solid state disk (‘SSD’) storage devices. The idea is to bring SSD’s up to the level of sophistication where enterprises are happy to use them for corporate data. Looks to us like Seagate is acting as the gatekeeper here and doesn’t want to give up its birthright without getting a royalty out of the deal. For Samsung this is a graceful way of getting into what has been, up to now, an entirely disk based market.