Liberty Media is continuing with its efforts announced earlier in the year to break its core business into three, one which holds the assets in DirecTV, Games Show Network, FUN Technologies, Liberty Sports Holdings, Starz Entertainment, and WildBlue Communications plus some cash. The rest of the operating businesses will in Liberty Interactive including QVC.com, Provide Commerce, Backcountry.com, Buyseasons, Bodybuilding.com, IAC/InterActiveCorp and Expedia and the Liberty Capital group makes up the third entity and include Starz Media, Atlanta National League Baseball Club, TruePosition, and minority investments in Time Warner and Sprint Nextel. We’re not quite sure if this is just tidying up, preparation for a further transaction, or just making the assets look a little more attractive to investors. Either way the tracking stocks that already cover the entertainment group rose when the company confirmed the split this week.
Over 130 top actors told the Screen Actors Guild in a letter that they should be more responsible and not go on strike. ‘We don’t think that an authorization can be looked at as merely a bargaining tool,’ they said in the letter. Signatories included Tom Hanks, George Clooney and Cameron Diaz,. The union meets in the new Year to decide whether or not to strike(see separate item inside).
A report from ABI Research says that the number of people watching video over the internet will rise from 563 million at the end of 2008 to 941 million by 2013. More and more of them will shift their viewing of internet video to a TV over that time also, instead of only viewing it on a PC, the report said, citing services such as Hulu and Netflix which have done deals with third party consumer electronics devices.
Swisscom says it will directly attach 100,000 homes to a new fiber-to-the-home network, by the end of next year. It has already laid out a fiber-to-the-node network to neighborhoods and will begin now actually connecting up homes in Zurich, Basel and Geneva and later the cities of St Gallen, Berne, Fribourg and Lausanne.
Telecom Italia’s HanseNet Alice IPTV service in Germany has been offering free IPTV to people that take its Internet and telephony services, but will stop next July, according to a reports in Satellite TV Market News. The public broadcast channels will still be free, such as ARD and ZDF, but Pay TV will go to €4.90 a month. Currently there is a notional fee of €9.90 but customers who also take Internet and telephony don’t have to pay. Arcor, the Vodafone owned IPTV service in Germany has only just come down to €9.95. Alice still only has around 25,000 customers, Vodafone claims considerably more but the market leader in IPTV is, of course, Deutsche Telekom.
Orange has lost the exclusive on the Apple iPhone 3G, in a ruling by the French competition council, after rival Bouygues Telecom said the contract violates competition rules. The council said there is already too limited competition in the French mobile market and that it is too expensive to change operators. Orange in a public reply pointed out that Bouygues had not adhered to its build out requirements in 3G, complaining that the decision undermines Orange’s efforts to develop high-speed mobile services in France. Orange has sold 150,000 first generation iPhones and 450,000 3G devices.
US home which have only cellphones have grown to 18%, and this is mostly among adults who live with people they are not related to and who rent rather than own their homes. The erosion has been a full 2% during the past year. This came out of US Federal figures released this week. Another 13% of homes have landlines but hardly ever use them, making it about three in 10 households where the inhabitants can only be reached on mobile handsets.
Finally an IPTV customer has taken the Cisco VQE in the form of Portuguese telco Sonaecom for its Clix SmarTV service. Cisco’s Visual Quality Experience technology stores a brief period of IPTV video so that it can resend lost packets to set tops to improve video quality in IPTV systems. It was launched in December 2006 and apart from trials there have been no takers to date. The router based system can also be configured to serve requests for fast channel change information, a little like Microsoft Mediaroom D servers.
Orange is reported as planning a new one-stop shop for content and applications, where the content can be played on either mobile devices, PCs and on an IPTV set-top box. Orange is already advanced in trying to integrate user interfaces, control mechanisms and content across its broadband, mobile and IPTV platforms, and recently added its mobile TV service to its hotspots and Wi-Fi/cellular convergence platform, Unik. This offering features a common electronic programming guide on TVs, PCs and handsets, and Orange is now taking the logical next leap, towards common content purchase and delivery.
Wireless researcher Informa says that the global mobile market will be a $1 trillion business by 2013, and that subscriptions worldwide will be 5.3 billion by then. It points out that it took 20 years to reach 3 billion subscriptions, but another 1.9 billion net additions will happen in just six years, with the global total nudging past the 5 billion milestone in 2011.