Canadian network policy management firm Sandvine has released a new Service Delivery Engine with new Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) for faster roll out of new mobile services such as roaming notifications, bill shock prevention, family plans and data bundles. Sandvine’s SDE is LTE standards-compliant, conforming to 3GPP Release 11.
South Korean set top maker Kaon Media has chosen MaxLinear RF tuners for its new hybrid HD set tops for the Latin American market, using the MxL683 single-chip silicon tuner-demodulator for its hybrid DTH + terrestrial set-top. Latin America uses a variant of ISDB-T which was MaxLinear’s first successful market, when it launched in Japan in the mid-Noughties
US researcher Evans Data says that mobile developers are embracing Near Field Communications with over 31% already supporting an NFC app and 45% more planning to use NFC. The survey was conducted in May 2013 across 500 developers actively working on mobile apps. Funny that Apple is so anti NFC, is that perhaps because it gains nothing these days from embracing standards?
US district judge Phyllis Hamilton has ruled against Apple in that stupid legal action where it decided it had invented the word Appstore. As a result Hamilton has pointed out that Amazon would have to be ‘passing off’ in other words trying to pretend to customers that it was Apple, by using that term. She thought that the use of the term Appstore was understood to be generic and so dismissed the suit. Even Apple is not dumb enough to appeal this verdict.
Make what you will of the executive changes at Barnes and Noble, but most are thinking that bringing back the founder Leonard Riggio, as executive Chairman as he tries to buy back the group, and watching him replace CEO William Lynch and the CFO with his own team, heralds an end to the Nook experiment. Now it is a matter of how to dispose of the business, sell it or close it or give it to a suitor for a share. All of this is rumor and supposition so far, but Riggio is known to be behind pulling it out of tablets, but the ereader business is surely the future. Or not. Digital education was referred to in the release, which sits in the Nook Media subsidiary, and you can’t have that without ereaders really.
The latest UK IPA Bellwether survey published this week shows an upward revision in marketing budgets in Q2 2013. The rise is the highest in almost six years. The conclusion seems to be that UK businesses are seeing a way out of the recession and think that now is the time to invest. Some 22% of companies reported an upward revision to marketing budgets compared with 15% looking to trim budgets. The IPA takes one from the other to show a net balance picture, and says this is its most positive swing for some time. Budgets for PR, sales promotion, direct marketing are also all up, while market research budgets remain unchanged (thanks guys). The IPA says that marketing spend has long been a key barometer of the health of the economy.
US researcher ABI Research says that the traditional TV middleware market, which was relatively flat between 2010 and 2011, grew 11% during 2012 to reach $1.13 billion. During this period, more advanced forms of video software grew over 40% to reach $890 million. Guide software, metadata, and technologies underlying DVR and Video on Demand are driving the growth in the advanced category, ABI says, with TiVo the most aggressive in multiscreen, and Rovi in complex metadata and ActiveVideo’s in cloud set tops.
CBS and Netflix this week announced an extension of their multiyear licensing agreement for a select library of content which can be streamed instantly to Netflix customers. New titles such as LA Complex, 4400 and CSI: NY will be available to Netflix subscribers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Broadcom says it has a new deal with Dish TV India, the largest DTH pay TV provider there, to use Broadcom SoCs to power its next gen set-tops. Dish will use the BCM7358 HD and BCM7301 SD SoCs. Dish has 400 channels and claims 15 million subscribers (we have it as having 13 million in a story further up). The SoCs in question are designed for cost effective DTH zapper boxes.
Content from the Canal+ VoD service Canalplay Infinity will be made available on an Apple TV in France. This is in line with Apple’s new approach to sign up with operators to help them bring pay TV to market, rather than trying to compete with traditional pay TV providers. Canal+ is the first pay TV group in France to offer content through the Apple TV and around 5,000 titles will be made available including French movies and content from all the usual Hollywood suspects. The service costs €9.99 a month.
UK set top maker Amino says that KartinaTV in Russia has deployed its set tops to launch its Russian language OTT video service. Kartina will being with a new advertising campaign aimed at both Russians in Europe and inside Russia. KartinaTV delivers TV content over the open Internet to Russian-speaking communities in Germany, USA, Israel and the UK. Content packages include a popular Russian broadcast TV and catch-up plus movies and sports. Amino also said this week that it has announced a range of enhanced multiscreen capabilities for its Aminet IPTV product range when running on Mineva’s iTVFusion 5 video service management platform. This enables operators to deliver a multiscreen experience to iOS and Android tablets and smartphones.
Rumors about a new Nokia Lumia 1020 are so strong now that they are being seen as controlled leaks by many, ahead of a Thursday launch (today). The new device appears to bring strong Camera zoom capability using its PureView cameraphone technology, which some say boasts 41 Megapixels.
US researcher Parks Associates says that Internet households globally will exceed 820 million 2017 and over 94% will have broadband. The firm also reports over 610 million households will have a data network, including over 100 million in North America and 133 million in Western Europe.
Californian encoder designer VidOvation has launched the Ven-5200 MPEG-4 encoding system offering H.264 encoding and supporting resolutions from 320 x 180 up to 1080p. It claims this has the highest channel density in the industry, up to 10 channels per rack unit (RU). It supports outputs in UDP, RTP, RTMP, direct HTTP and HTTP live streaming for unicast or multicast. The company said that a 2RU rack of 20 channels only consumes 150 watts when outputting 1080p video.
A report from the Confederation of British Industry is urging UK government ministers to accelerate a £300m scheme to provide superfast broadband to rural households. There were moves in a recent budget to put off the planned spend until 2015. The initiative was announced in 2011 to reach 90% of UK homes with superfast broadband by 2015 backed by £530 million of matched funding for rural broadband projects and a further £300 million, from future BBC license fee revenue. The CBI calls for clarity on the full funding and wants to stop government plans to push back the spending.
Carlos Slim Helu, one of the richest men in the world is putting $40 million into UK music-recognition app Shazam. The UK company will also have Slim’s America Movil operator pre-install the app on smartphones sold across Latin America. Shazam claims 70 million active users and is expected to IPO after this round of funding runs out.
The UK’s Oregan Networks has established an office in Latin America in Mexico to serve the local Pay TV sector to go with its existing Argentina office. This will cater for local broadcasters, which are looking to offer unmanaged Internet delivery and low priced CPE.
Alcatel-Lucent and Telkom Indonesia are to enhance broadband connectivity in the region by installing further undersea cables across more than 3,000 kilometers to help address mobile data traffic. This is part of Telkom Indonesia’s Nusantara Super Highway infrastructure. The fiber network will connect the islands of Sulawesi, Maluku, and Papua in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago supporting up to 100 Gigabit per second. Telkom Indonesia currently provides high-speed broadband to more than 19 million customers and 125 million cellular customers.
Swiss set top player Advanced Digital Broadcast said it has further orders from the Polish cable operator Vectra to upgrade its own set tops with set top remote monitoring, a new advertising control system and a user messaging system which will offers electronic messaging for things like recommendations, promotions or notifications to go to targeted customers. Vectra is third placed in cable in Poland after UPC and Multimedia Polska and claims 860,000 subscribers in 167 cities. Poland is dominated by DTH, with over 50% of the market, while cable has 32%.
UK based SwiftServe said this week it will provide CDN service to Singapore-based PurpleStream to deliver HD video content in real time to any internet-enabled device, in any territory. PurpleStream’s customers include TV broadcasters, channel content aggregators and OTT providers and will offer the SwiftServe CDN as a service to its customers.
Light Reading says that US university IPTV service Tivli has $6.3 million first round funding from HBO and Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments, other investors include Felicis Ventures, Rho Ventures, CBC New Media Group and WME. Tivli began life offering TV Everywhere for Harvard students and now has installations at Yale, Texas A&M University, the University of Washington and Wesleyan University.