Cisco results are out this week, and although it has not yet broken down its business into segments to see how well it is doing at NDS or in set tops, total revenues for the quarter were $12.2 billion, up 5% with net income at $2.5 billion, up 14.5% on last year . The nine month figures showed revenue of $36.2 billion, compared with $34.4 billion in 2012 and net income of $7.7 billion compared with $6.1 billion and Cisco generated $3.1 billion in cash and has $47.4 billion in the bank. It completed its Intucell and Cognitive Security acquisitions, and announced a deal to buy SolveDirect, an Austrian company in cloud services as well as Ubiquisys, a small-cell player. In the TV space it said that GET, a leading cable operator in Norway, selected the Cisco Videoscape Unity video services delivery platform.
MoCA inventor Entropic said it has filed a patent infringement suit against Toronto-based ViSX Systems and its US subsidiary, which claims the company’s products infringe on two of its MoCA patents, but did not detail the claims. ViXS responded with a statement that said there had been no approach from Entropic and the suit was out of the blue, and that it was confident of its own technology position. ViXS has many of its own patents in media processing.
UK consulting group Farncombe said it is working with OTT browser company Inview to offer operators in Latin America a cost-effective way to launch OTT services. The two have a collaboration which they call T4, and Farncombe provides systems integration alongside Inview’s Liberator OTT platform to build customized hybrid OTT platforms with the Inview UI and its cloud-based back office system and ready-made TV Apps.
Canadian IPTV player Espial, has a deal with Harvard International and has shipped the Espial set top client on its View21 and Goodmans set tops in the UK. Using the Espial platform, Harvard will be able to generate additional revenue streams through the sale of companion apps View21 Play and View21 Photo.
Dish Network in the US, currently in the middle of bidding for third placed cellular operator Sprint has had its DISH DBS subsidiary offer $2.5 billion of senior notes. The net proceeds of the offering will be placed into escrow and will only be released to give cash to DISH Network to finance the Sprint deal or given back if that deal does not happen.
Chinese video encoding supplier Yuvad Technologies has announced the general availability of its Yuvision family of video encoding systems, developed specifically for multiscreen in the OTT market. They are based on the Yuvad flagship CES platform, which has over one thousand systems shipped worldwide. These systems offer clustering support and advanced ad insertion.
US researcher Parks Associates said it had conducted new research which showed that 26% of US broadband households own a smart TV and that 63% of smart TV owners are currently connecting the set to the Internet, and 79% of those who do connect, use the TV to watch premium online video on a monthly basis. Previously the number of people that buy smart TVs has been questioned because as few as 30% of them actually knew that the TV they bought could be connected to the internet, quite clearly that percentage is now rising rapidly.
Failure does not take a long time. It only seems weeks ago that we were swooning at the prospect of the Home Facebook social networking UI that was put on an HTC phone, and its potential for mass market disruption. AT&T is now considering dropping the phone, says Bloomberg. It has already dropped the pricing to $100 through lack of interest.
Liberty Global said it will appoint Robert Dunn, currently managing director of UPC Netherlands, to the position of Chief Financial Officer of Virgin Media once its acquisition has closed. Dunn has held several senior management positions with Liberty Global over the last 13 years, including MD at UPC Ireland and CFO of Liberty’s European cable division. He will report to Tom Mockridge, who was announced as Virgin Media’s incoming CEO last week.
Time Warner Cable said this week it has officially launched its latest TWC TV update for Android smartphones and tablets. Customers now have in-home access to 4,000 hours of VoD and also select On Demand and some live TV channels when out and about. Out of home content includes 1,100 hours of VoD and 10 live TV news, sports and entertainment channels.
In Australia Accuris Networks, which considers itself an innovator in WiFi offload and Acurix Networks, a US supplier of WiFi offloading tools announced a successful integration of their two offerings, giving mobile network operators a joint solution for seamless offload onto a carrier-grade Wi-Fi. Testing was completed on Perth’s metromesh network, Australia’s largest contiguous metro WiFi zone. Subscribers were able to seamlessly roam from the 3G network to the Acurix-powered metromesh WiFi network.
The Dyle brand of mobile TV products, based around the ATSC Mobile Handheld standard, has been quiet for almost two years now, with a few more markets coming online and one or two new devices, but this week US WiFi brand Belkin announced its own TV receiver to connect to Apple iOS devices. This is the first time that a well-known US brand like Belkin has got behind the idea and it offers a receiver accessory for Dyle, which sends the TV signal to a physically attached iOS device, rather than over a WiFi connection. The Belkin device weighs six ounces and is half the size of a deck of cards and it users the iPad’s 30-pin connector to attach. It costs $130 and can be pre-ordered through Amazon.
The CMT regulator in Spain reports that in the first quarter of the year the pay TV market lost 98,000 subscribers, due partly to the financial crisis and also to higher taxation in the sector. Canal Plus lost 28,000 subs down to 1.69 million, ONO lost 19,000 and Telefonica’s IPTV service Movistar Imagenio lost a massive 51,000 subs to go below 700,000 for the first time. Pay DTT has almost died in Spain except some single channel offerings, soccer based Gol TV and one movie channel.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stood up at an investor conference this week and said he expects content and app developers to soon introduce new types of business models, effectively copying the Kindle deal whereby customers can buy books over cellular without paying for the network access, but this is expected to apply to video as well. ESPN is known to be in discussions with AT&T so that live sports updates can be viewed without it contributing to the consumer’s broadband data, and instead the price for this data would be built into the price of the ESPN service. That’s one way around Net Neutrality.
TeliaSonera the telco in Scandinavia says it has bought a national CDN from US firm EdgeCast Networks. Edgecast said it expected to enable TeliaSonera to offer its Nordic customers up to three times faster internet services.
In the UK TalkTalk says it has signed up 150,000 new subscribers to its YouView service in the first three months of this year. This is more than any other UK pay TV network including Sky, Virgin Media or BT Vision. The service has been going for 5 or 6 months and reached 230,000 by the end of March and is now growing at 12,000 users a week. TalkTalk is giving away a DVR with a service upgrade.
Google duly announced its new music service at it IO developer conference on Wednesday. It is called Google Play Music All Access, and is similar to Spotify and Pandora, and costs $9.99 a month after a 30 day free trial. A listen now feature will create a mix of favorite artists or genres based on previously listened to songs. Anyone signing up by 30 June will get a reduced price of $7.99 per month. Google executives copied the swagger and presentation style that Apple had in its heyday, showing off developer improvements, new APIs, gaming additions and revealed that there have now been 900 million Android activations.