Alcatel-Lucent has cut a deal to market the Edgeware VoD servers for IPTV which are based on a massive number of Flash memory chips. The deal is a global partnership to integrate Edgware’s Orbit 2x and Reflex 2x video servers into Alcatel-Lucent’s 5910 Video Server.
If you were one of the few people that hoped that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would be brought down by the stock option scandal at Apple, think again. Jobs along with other executives have all collectively agreed to settle litigation with the payout of $14 million. The issue was over the backdating of a number of Apple options to dates when the price to buy them was lower. Apple will also have to pay $8.5 million in attorneys’ fees and $350,000 in expenses and had already taken an $84 million charge related to backdating.
The settlement called for Apple’s board to change the way it handles the granting of stock options, which has already been done.
UK set top company Pace was showing off its latest innovation in wireless technology at IBC ‘ the Pace Connection Suite ‘ which is a way of rapidly re-encoding and re-sizing a video stream to use all the available bandwidth that a wi-fi connection is currently giving, in the hope that an operator can have Quality of Service when video is delivered across a Wi-fi link. Pace showed the proof of concept at IBC last week, but has not yet scheduled it for inclusion in a product. It would go head to head with Ruckus Wireless and various power based transmission systems.
One of Russia’s largest broadband suppliers Comstar-Direct is taking new iPlex transcoders from Tandberg for its IPTV head end in Moscow to implement H.264 encoding. The iPlex models are the cheaper devices that Tandberg inherited when it bought Skystream Networks. Comstar has 3.6 million residential subscribers in Moscow and 750,400 broadband subscribers.
The Open IPTV Forum announced a number of new members in time for the IBC show in Amsterdam, including enCentro Systems, HwaCom Systems, Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik, Neotion, Sigma Designs, UTStarcom and WyPlay. This grouping is now starting to look a lot more credible when added to the founding group including Ericsson, France Telecom, Nokia Siemens Networks, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony and Telecom Italia along with AT&T. This now brings the total membership to 44 companies.
Java specialist Osmosys and Hitachi Software Engineering have announced a first commercial deployment of the companies’ integrated Blu-ray Software Platform. The Blu-ray solution has been embedded onto chipsets from Renesas and will be used in new products for the US. This system on a chip solution used by Renesas creates a complete reference design for Blu-ray players and is available for any CE vendor.
NBC Universal and Apple have resolved their dispute over pricing and the NBC content is back in the iTunes store. NBC TV programs had been removed from iTunes but are now back with immediate effect, with TV programs costing $1.99 per episode and $2.99 for HD versions. Apple has said publicly that these are the same rates as for anyone else and that it did not back down. NBC might not agree.
Israeli VoD supplier BitBand, has been chosen as a base platform of BCC’s IPTV video delivery system to UTK, a fixed-line service provider for the Southern Federal District in Russia belonging to Svyazinvest holdings, which provides services for more than 230,000 broadband subscribers and operates in a territory with a population of 18.5 million people.
Neotion and Fastcom have merged their Common Interface and CPCM platforms so that there is a protected seamless bridge between networked TV sets and PCs. Neotion is a CI Modules specialist and Fastcom is a specialist in DVB-CPCM implementations. The two reckon that disruptive business models using the PC as a Juke Box for the TV set are now far easier.
Italian set top maker Pirelli Broadband and leading forward error correction company Digital Fountain, have agreed to integrate Digital Fountain’s ToughStream into the Pirelli’s IPTV portfolio. ToughStream is an advanced application-layer which eliminates video and audio degradation caused by network impairments, including packet loss.
IBM and Widevine Technologies said this week they are helping Skynet, a Lithuanian ISP and will provide premium TV content to all of its 25,000 users. Skynet will launch a new service later this year, with basic and premium television channels to compete with mainstream cable, satellite and other IPTV providers in region called ‘PenkiTV.’
Time Warner this week warned of slower growth at AOL with advertising sales unlikely to grow much for the rest of the year. The CFO said that it had been growing like a weed, but that the organization had some cancellations which had rocked its confidence that it would grow over the year.
Spanish broadcasting specialist SIDSA turned up with three days notice at IBC and showed what the DVB Project thought was the most advanced DVB-T2 circuit design it had come across. NXP was the only other company at the show which had an implementation shown off in a Pace set top. SIDSA came to fame when it built a DVB-H service in Russia from the ground up, writing all the software, and designing the DVB-H chips all on its own.