UK set top company Pace has launched what it says is the first Freeview+ HD DVR in the UK. The idea is to get a huge amount of buy-in for recording World Cup Soccer games later this month. It will be sold using the Philips brand which it acquired the rights to when it bought its set top division last year. It has a 500 GB hard drive which takes 125 hours of HD content and is called the HDT8520 and has gone on sale for £299 from high-street retailers John Lewis, Currys, Comet and Tesco and online at Amazon.
UK radio chip specialist Mirics said this week that another Chinese company, Yuan High-Tech, has developed TV receivers based on the Mirics FlexiTV platform. The reference platform will target Yuan’s top tier OEM customers and PC system integration partners. FlexiTV comes with a radio chip and relies on software run on the PC processor to handle TV signal demodulation.
SMC Networks has joined MoCa, the industry association behind the home coaxial connection technology, as an associate member. SMC makes CPE equipment for broadband service providers in the US.
One or two of the developer blogs in the US are starting to be told that Apple is about to ban the use of Widgets in its Apps. Apple has told them that it doesn’t want any of its App Store Apps operating within their own desktop environments. The more control that Apple wants to exert over its own dominant platform, the more likely that an anti-trust complaint will be successful against the runaway leader in downloaded mobile apps. Of course if Android Market continues to catch it up, then ant-trust wouldn’t be appropriate.
Israeli mobile TV chip leader Siano has opened another office in China. It already had a presence in Beijing and Shenzhen and now will open up in Shanghai. It has also added a number of local industry executives with 20 years or more experience with companies like Omnivision, Motorola, Texas Instruments and Spansion. Siano currently has around 70% of CMMB mobile TV chip shipments in China.
China Telecom has announced a major initiative across China to build out Fiber-to-the-Home to 18 million connections across the country, according to the Xinhua News Agency. This will mean that China Telecom will end up offering 70% of users in towns and cities speeds of at least 12 Mbps before the end of 2010. Eventually it could offer speeds of up to 100 Mbps in key cities.
Canadian telco Bell Canada is campaigning to its regulator the CRTC to change the rules in Canada. It says legislation at present makes it easier for cablecos to sign up telephone customers and harder for Telcos to sign up TV customers. This is similar to the way that the FCC in the US is trying to re-categorize the provision of some services, such as broadband, as telecommunications, rather than information services. All Bell says it is after regulatory symmetry. Bell is on the verge of extending its IPTV services into Toronto and Montreal this year.
Google has bought advertising start-up business Invite Media, which describes itself as a demand side platform and reports have the deal valued at about $70 million, a price range which is sure to mean the technology will emerge in Google’s front line services. The unit is expected to run at arms length from Google for a while operating alongside Google’s AdX advertising exchange.