Thomson said this week that subsidiary Technicolor has completed the transfer of all playout and delivery services for ITV, the UK commercial broadcaster. The work will now be done at Technicolor’s transmission centre in Chiswick Park, London. Technicolor will look after 23 regional channels plus broadband, mobile and catch-up TV.
Cabot Communications says it is the first middleware vendor to successfully complete SmarDTV CI+ interoperability testing. CI+ gives consumer electronic devices such as digital TVs and set tops, access to pay TV services via a plug-in CI+ module. The Cabot’s system is called Keystone, and provides its own security which allows for the exchange of encryptions keys across a secure data link. It has passed tests on secure channel negotiation, key exchange, certificate handling and video decryption.
The BBC has begun work on the next generation of its iPlayer which is already used regularly by millions of homes, and downloads around 7 petabytes of video each month. The new system will centre on personalization, socialization and customization and will allow for alerts, an online library and scheduled downloads.
The BBC Trust has decided definitively not to refer Canvas for a full scale market impact review or a public value test, which would have been conducted by Ofcom. That process could potentially have sunk it, but the BBC Trust, which polices the BBC, says that it can go ahead. BSkyB immediately issued howls of derision and said that Canvas would have a bad effect on rivals’ like Sky.
Clearwire, the WiMAX network in the US, said this week that it will partner with networking giant Cisco Systems. Cisco it to provide the IP core infrastructure, as well as develop new mobile WiMAX devices. It will also offer Clearwire access to its network of channel partners.
Various reports have highlighted the disparity in Hulu’s publicized numbers this week from Nielsen and from rival comScore. One says that Hulu is used by nine million people each month while the other says it’s closer to 42 million. Hulu growth according to comScore is 490% in usage this year, while Nielsen’s numbers for April show that Hulu is losing audience. They can’t both be right.
A French Appeals court has squashed the decision by the Tribunal of Commerce which said that Orange had unfairly bundled its Orange Sport TV channel as part of its own triple play which forced sports fans to subscribe to them. The case was brought by rival telcos SFR and Iliad who are now deciding how to react.
Qualcomm’s FLO Mobile TV service in the US has struck a deal with NBC Universal to show a ton of live sport including the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, the French Open, the Stanley Cup Final, the US Open and Wimbledon ‘ all part of NBC Sports Championship Season on NBC2GO.
Online video indexer blinkx said that its loss was much smaller this year as revenue more than doubled on robust demand for its technology. It said that 2010 would show continued growth. It never used to give out visitor data but said it had 88 million visitors in March 2009 up from 56 a year ago. The loss was down to $10.5 million for the year on revenue up to $13.9 million, compared to $6.5 million last year.
Qualcomm said this week that Gionee Communications a phone maker in China’s domestic market, has entered into a 3G license agreement with the US company. Gionee is licensed to make and sell subscriber units and modem cards using any Qualcomm technology in the CDMA2000, WCDMA TD-SCDMA standards.
Spanish consumer electronics company Conceptronics has appointed Actebis France as an official distributor to focused primarily on retail resellers. It will market the Conceptronic media player which is used to store media files from PCs for your TV. Actebis is more usually a computer products wholesaler.
In Italy there are now 8.1 million homes which use digital terrestrial TV using the DVB-T standard. This is 38% of homes there and in the past 12 months another 2.7 million households adopted the platform. There are now 13 million devices deployed in Italy, rapidly approaching the type of numbers in the UK and France, the first countries to adopt DVB-T. The split in Italy is roughly 43% in TV sets and 57% in set tops.
Pyramid Research says that LTE subscribers will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 404% from 2010 to 2014, faster than any previous mobile standard. This is largely because this is the first time the entire world has got behind a single cellular standard. To date says Pyramid, 27 mobile operators worldwide have publicly committed to deploying LTE, with 12 of them expected to roll out commercial services in 2010 and the remainder during 2011 and 2012.
InformITV tells us that there is to be a European alternative to Canvas, the BBC inspired hybrid internet and DVB-T set top. The idea comes from broadcasters in France and Germany based on existing open standards and say they will work with the European Broadcasting Union and standardize the specification through standards body ETSI.
Microsoft has added Netflix to the list of content providers in its Windows Media Center for Vista, which may introduce the Netflix online Watch Instantly film service to a wider audience even than the 10 million or so Netflix customers. Only for the US though.