The Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia says that pay TV in Asia has reached 50% of homes there, which it says makes it ripe for great exploitation of advertising on these networks. This amounts to 363 million homes. South Korea rates top with 99% and Indonesia last with just 3%. India is still rampant, which it says has reached 75% penetration, as is China where the penetration is 48%. Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam are also fast growers. But revenue is another matter. The US homes bring in around $102 billion in Pay TV, while Asia manages just $30 billion. Europe by comparison has a 61.9% penetration and revenues of $41 billion. It also says that around $2 billion a year is lost to piracy in the region.
US networking firm Adran told the Broadband World Forum this week that it has a breakthrough approach to broadband service delivery in the form of Ultra Broadband Ethernet. It says this is a viable alternative to fiber to the home and enables service providers to deliver high-bandwidth services, while dramatically accelerating services for end-users and providing significant Capex and Opex reductions compared to fiber. It says that initially it can deliver 100 Mbps symmetrical broadband service, which will later scale to 1 Gbps, with ultra-low power requirements and low latency. Adtran says that it has a number of trials with tier 1 operators in North America, Europe and Asia and it will unveil its product line in more detail in the first half of 2011.
Japanese chip maker Renesas, at its US arm, Renesas Electronics America said that its R-Car ARM and SH-4A system-on-chip series, has been integrated with the newly announced Microsoft Windows Embedded Automotive 7 platform and is available to OEMs.
ZTE says that it has signed definitive agreements to buy $3 billion of chips and components from five major US technology suppliers over the next 3 years, citing deals with Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Freescale, Altera and Broadcom. ‘As a publicly traded and transparent company with more than 18.72% equity owned by European and American investors, we believe it is very important for ZTE to cooperate with US partners and continue to increase our investment in the US market, ‘ a ZTE statement said.
Related Content Database, a supplier of software to take advantage of the Blu-ray Java BD route out of disk players to the internet, said at Adobe’s worldwide developer conference that it had a developer kit for the new Adobe AIR2.5 for TV platform. The company said that it will take the guess work from fundamental platform issues such as device registration, account linking and developers can use those web services as building blocks in their own applications.
Quad play operator SFR in France will use G-cluster cloud gaming technology, for its Neufbox TV customers to give access to a game on demand catalogue on the TV. After running a trial phase for 9 months, SFR and G-cluster are presenting a gaming system which they say gets over any generation technical issues on the older Neufbox systems.
The US business market for wireline data remained steady with year-over-year average gains of roughly 2% said US Researcher In-Stat. The Education vertical is seeing the highest spending gains, while Construction is faring the worst. The Healthcare and Social Services vertical market spent $5.5 billion on wireline data services in 2009 In-Stat said.
Israeli video over WiFi specialist Celeno Communications, says it has signed triple-play service deals in Slovenia and Croatia, with Amis Telekom using a
Celeno powered Ethernet bridge as the home-networking cornerstone of the Amis digital TV service.
Broadcom this week bought Percello, a developer of systems-on-a-chip for femtocells. The acquisition of Percello will take Broadcom into femtocells for the first time, with an energy-efficient, low cost femtocell architecture, the company said. The femtocell market has risen to 1 million femtocells shipped during 2010, taking it to the kind of scale that begins to interest companies like Broadcom.
Broadcom came out with figures for its 3rd quarter this week with record revenues of $1.8 billion, up 12.6% over last quarter, and up 44% over the $1.25 billion delivered this time last year. Net income was $327 million. It says to expect more of the same in the fourth quarter.
LimeWire has been forced by a court injunction to immediately stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software. A sign on its website reminds everyone that filesharing copyrighted content is illegal. The LimeWire software has been downloaded ‘hundreds of millions’ of times and says that it hopes to be back in business and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future. Some chance. LimeWire has lost a copyright infringement case and will shortly have damages awarded against it. Then it really might have to close down.
Digital Media Wire this week says that the National Association of Broadcasters trade group, which represents radio stations, TV networks and others, has submitted a proposal to settle disputes over performance royalties for radio, proposing stations pay between 0.25% and 1% of net revenues in royalties. It will also support the idea that all mobile phones should have FM radio chips installed in them by law, which has been proposed in order to kill off, or at least subdue, streaming internet radio.
Leading US cableco Comcast said that it now has over 100 content providers lined up for its Xfinity TV Everywhere proposal. Xfinity TV is available online for free to Comcast digital customers, and offers almost 150,000 video choices online. It looks like only a challenge to the legality of the TV Everywhere approach can knock a dent in the online video service now. Currently content is limited to the broadband line at the same home where TV service is provided, though this is supposed to change shortly.
While TV Everywhere plans are taking off, the paid variety don’t seem to be. Netflix is doing fantastically well (see separate piece,) but according to the Wall Street Journal Hulu is thinking about halving the prices of its Hulu Plus service, presumably because not enough people are showing interest at $9.95. Hulu Plus is limited to current broadcast shows from its three owners ABC, NBC and Fox.
Google said this week that its Android market has 100,000 downloadable applications. Critics point out that it has reached this point slower than Apple, although the announcement comes just 7 months after it said it had only 30,000 apps.
UK cableco Virgin Media said that it will begin rolling out its long awaited 100 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 based broadband service, with pre-registration starting this week. Installations will start in December and be priced at around £35 a month. Virgin says that trials showed that internet usage increased exponentially as users had access to this kind of speed in a hassle free contract, especially to watch online video. Virgin will also launch its TiVo based OTT video service in the run up to Christmas.