Thomson said this week it has been selected to supply Tahiti Nui Satellite with its DSI2110 HD set-top box to support the launch of high definition channels in Q4 2009. The HD MPEG-4 satellite set top will link over broadband and provide TV services across French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean.
OpenTV said that Bresnan Communications has deployed OpenTV EclipsePlus to manage its advertising sales operations. Bresnan Communications is a US MSO with 300,000 customers in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. OpenTV EclipsePlus is an advertising management tool to help manage advertising yield.
Israeli and UK conditional access supplier NDS said that Ukrainian DTH supplier MYtv has chosen NDS to support its pay TV service to be launched in late 2009. It will use set top MediaHighway middleware, Videoguard conditional access, an NDS EPG server and the NDS DVR technology. The service will offer paid HD programming using DVB-S2, alongside some free to air channels.
US cable supplier Arris has landed a deal to supply its DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem Termination System at 4 MSOs across the Czech Republic; Elsat, BKS; Self Servis and Kabelova Televize Koprivnice which pass around 1.2 million homes.
French set top builder Netgem says it has been chosen by Telstra to supply set tops and software for its T-Box hybrid service which combines broadband TV and video services from its BigPond IPS with and DVB-T digital terrestrial broadcasting from Telstra.
UK set top maker Pace says that it has signed its second MultiDweller customer in the form of Quadriga, which provides services to 400,000 guest rooms, in 50 countries throughout EMEA. MultiDweller is based on the DOCSIS standard and converts existing cable infrastructure into a localized high-speed IP network, and acts as a mini head-end to distribute individualized broadcast, broadband and internet services to multiple users.
Swisscom has decided that it no longer likes the Bluewin name and will rebrand the Mediaroom IPTV services as Swisscom TV. The service is now three years old and just reached 200,000 customers.
Dilithium the specialist US mobile video player said that Media Phone Plus of Kuwait has chosen Dilithium appliances to offer new multimedia services, including mobile access to rich video content such as Jukebox, Live TV and Video on Demand. The Dilithium system is made up of its multimedia gateways which sit inside the network and its ViVAS services creation and delivery platform.
AOL has said that it will cut another 2500 jobs, about a third of its workforce, and is aiming to cut $300 million in annual costs, as part of its planned spin-off from Time Warner, happening next month.
Qualcomm says that PC maker Lenovo will use its new Gobi2000 technology in its upcoming ThinkPad laptops in the X, T and W Series beginning in 2010 to enable global 3G connectivity. Gobi is the only chip we know of which can support both CDMA EV-DO and UMTS 3G with HSDPA, creating a truly global mobile broadband chip.
Google this week released the open source code for the new Google Chrome operating system and says that the first devices running it will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010. Google said it wanted the code out there so that the open source community could contribute to its development.
So farewell then Joost, the internet TV station that ran over a P2P network, which virtually no-one watched. It has been gobbled up by US online ad network Adconion Media Group, which shared the investor Index Ventures with Joost. It will keep operating Joost.com and use it to drive its own video advertising service which grew rapidly last year.
Cellco 3 UK has launched a mobile TV subscription VoD service, called simply ‘TV on Demand.’ It is managed by Mobix Interactive, now part of the On Demand Group, which is part of VoD firm SeaChange International. Subscriptions will be £5 per month or £1.49 per day for unlimited access and will launch shortly.