Revelations this week from the Wall Street Journal have it that Amazon is preparing a streaming TV and movie subscription service to augment its pay per view service. In the same week, internet billionaire Mark Cuban, now more interested in American Football perhaps than the business that gave him his fortune, has come out and said that Netflix and businesses like it, including we supposed this new Amazon service, will shortly go away. They can’t both be right. His logic is that the content owners will squeeze them of content. We’re on the internet’s side on this one. Cuban was speaking at a UBS Global Media conference in New York and other speakers nodded sagely and agreed with him. The key to the new Amazon Service is that it will be free, say insiders, to members of Amazon Prime, the company’s premium shipping service, which currently costs $79 a year.
Modern Times Group which has 1 million plus subscribers to its Scandinavian Viasat DTH pay TV service, has entered into a strategic cooperation with LG Electronics, to make its Viasat OnDemand internet Pay TV services available directly on all LG TV sets enabled with its NetCast connectivity. The
Viasat OnDemand user interface will be built into LG TV sets and content includes live sport, hit TV series, and access to 200 feature films at any given time.
UK set top maker Amino Technologies said in a trading update that it will record a small loss for the year, as expected, and sales are at record levels with a strong order book. Orders received in the second half of 2010 reached 307k units compared to 280k units this time last year and 351k units in the first half, which it says represents £20.5m in revenue. Its tier 1 contract at Telecom Italia began deploying the Amino Freedom hybrid/OTT on December 1 and revenue will be recognized in financial year 2010/11. Because the deployment happened after the year end Amino said inventory was up at £11.6 million compared to its usual £5 million or so and cash balances were temporarily down.
We were pretty sure that ISDB-T had already been embraced by Colombia, but it still has a decision taken by the National TV Commission on its books that says that regular DTT should go the way of DVB-T. To get rid of that decision suddenly there are reports in the local El Espectador newspaper, saying that the DVB-T decision had ‘irregularities.’ The report also says that Europe has not delivered the economic support it promised. Columbia would be crazy to go it alone and use DVB-T, and will instead end up as an ISDB-T supporter, we’re sure.
US researcher In-Stat says that Apple’s new patent on a 3D projection system which needs no special glasses and which allows more than one user to view it on a screen will accelerate the industry. We weren’t aware of any 3D work that Apple has indulged in, but back in 2006 it filed a patent saying that by detecting where each user is in the viewing area and separately creating an image for them, multiple images can be projected to different points on a special reflective screen. We’re sure we have heard similar ideas well before 2006, and we question if this patent would hold up to international scrutiny. In-Stat says that this will emerge in 3D gaming for the Macs. We can’t see it emerging at all in the near future. We think In-Stat is confusing market weight with innovation here in saying that Apple will dominate this sector, it may deliver a dominant product, but we think it’s unlikely to lead the technology, which so far has mostly been led by Japanese CE companies and the odd US start up.
In-Stat also said that mobile phones will emerge as the largest HDMI chip market so that phones can power HD TV sets. It says that HDMI has become pervasive in consumer electronics, accounting for over 350 million devices shipping in 2010. Has In-Stat never heard of DLNA and MIMO Wi-Fi? Surely that’s the way ahead for exporting TV signals from phones.
The UK regulator Ofcom says that although landline miss-selling, illegal account switching and slow broadband speeds are all still with us, complaints from the UK public about telecoms services, have fallen by almost 20% in the UK over the past four years. The results are in the new version of the Consumer Experience Report from Ofcom.
For a deal that it has never announced, it seems odd that the Google bid for Chicago-based group buying service Groupon has now been called off, but that’s what the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The company was supposed to sell up for about $5.3 billion plus some earn out extras. Now talks are off and it plans to go public the Journal says ‘ good luck with that.
We met The Astonishing Tribe at IBC and have to say the most astonishing thing about it was its name. The company has a bunch of software for designing UIs for phone makers and didn’t really have any unique IP to speak of. But now it has been bought by Blackberry maker RIM and has gone back to what it had its heart set on, actually designing major interfaces for smart phones. Hopefully the deal will lead to some RIM UI originality, however we always find that this type of company gets listened to when it’s external and ignored when it’s part of the team. We’ll have to see.
Google now has its own eBookstore in the US with more than three million titles which work with a Google eBooks Web Reader, which we assume is more of an experiment in cloud apps, than a genuine service. You usually want to read a book when you are bored, and sometimes that can be when you are out of touch with the internet. Can you imagine reading on a train and finding the next page can’t be downloaded because of a tunnel? Apparently users can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with a password-protected Google account with unlimited ebook storage. There will be free app versions for Android and Apple devices and in many books users can select font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing and pick up on the page where it is left off when switching devices.
Virgin Media said this week it has bought back 500,000 shares of common stock as a part of a £700 million capital return program previously announced on 28 July 2010. The highest price paid per share was $27.25 and the lowest price paid per share was $26.97. The repurchased shares will be cancelled reducing the number of shares to 322,419,886. Virgin (once NTL) has come a long way in the last seven years, since debt for equity deals plundered the ownership of the company from private hands and put it mostly in the hands of major banking lenders.
Comcast says that it has an Xfinity app for Android powered devices to access email, voice and video service features, available free as of now on Android Market. It had an iPhone version a while back and has had iPad version for about two weeks.
News Corp acquisition Myspace has been faltering lately and Reuters reports the COO, Chase Carey, saying publicly that the company is open to a sale or partnership deal. AOL and Yahoo are cited as potential partners, and if they merge, that will reduce the rumor mill by at least one candidate (see separate story). In November, Carey said Myspace was expected to get on a clear path to profitability within quarters. So is that profitability or a clear path? How many Quarters again?
Time Warner Cable has a new offering called SignatureHome, which features the usual triple play stuff, digital cable, Internet service and home phone, plus Whole House DVR, Remote DVR Manager, Look Back and Start Over features, Wireless Home Networking for up to 14 devices, and VoiceZone on PC, which allows retrieval of voice messages online. These customers will get a personalized support service too. No prices were given because it will be different prices in different parts of the country, no doubt.