Thomson Video Networks has finally got its HEVC act together and will show off its first UHD encoders, packagers and contribution systems at IBC this September. It’s been a bit of a race for all the encoder vendors to embrace HEVC but really few customers are likely to commit until there is a full eco-system in place. Thomson will add the Vibe Em4000 eight channel encoder, the Vibe VS7000 which packages video into MPEG-DASH for multiscreen and the Vibe CP6000 contribution encoder, all of which still seem to be powered by its existing Mustang chips, although it is unclear if there are new versions of this.
Toshiba has upped the write speed on its new Exceria series of SD memory cards to 240 Megabytes per second, and will be launched worldwide in October, starting in Japan. The higher speeds are achieved through a new controller, and will be available in either 32GB or 16GB. One application is continuous high definition still photography, though there are bound to be video applications as well.
Hungarian Telco Magyar Telecom will restructure its balance sheet and get a €25m investment from Mid Europa Partners. The proposed restructuring will sustain a minimum allowed liquidity level of €10m, and is expected to last until October 2013. Magyar is owned by Invitel, has around 150,000 cable TV and 35,000 IPTV customers.
Deutsche Telekom has taken a big step this week towards its goal of using vectoring, which allows higher transmission rates to be reached through existing copper, but stops unbundling from being possible, after the German Bundesnetzagentur submitted a draft decision to the European Commission and granted conditional approval. The safeguards in the draft to prevent anti-competition practices state that DT must continue to allow competitors access to the local loop at the street cabinets, but may refuse access under certain conditions so as to enable vectoring to be implemented at the cabinet by itself or another company.
The China Internet Network Information Center said in its quarterly report that there are 591 million internet users in China as of the end of June. These users spend as much as 21.7 hours online each week, a rise of 1.2 hours in 6 months. The numbers of internet users has risen by 26.6 million in six months and represents a 44.1% penetration. Some 464 million of these access the internet through a phone, around 78.5%. The rural regions have far less internet access, accounting for only 29.5% of China’s internet users. Most popular applications were messaging, search requests reading news, listening to music and blogging. But accessing travel sites and planning trips is growing the fastest as an activity.
The US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York has backed the original court decision that Aereo has no copyright abuse case to answer and the court’s processes were all good and proper. Naturally the broadcasters are saying they want to take it to a higher court. Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC and other broadcasters called for an ‘en banc’ review where the entire panel of judges need to be called upon to try the case, and this has now been denied. This one has to go to the Supreme Court because there is so much at stake, but in the end, this will be upheld and the broadcasters are going to have to do the one thing they really can ‘ which is to stop messing about with halfhearted online attempts like Hulu and take their programming online, each with their own service.
The BBC in the UK has just announced the BBC User Experience Research Partnership, a long-term collaboration between BBC R&D and leading universities in the fields of User Experience and Human Computer Interaction research. The academic partners will be Bath, Dundee, UCL in London, Newcastle, Nottingham and Swansea, which have all committed to support the initiative for at least four years. They will introduce large scale pilots and prototypes, and explore new forms of content and interaction in multi-platform, along with new ways of producing media.
The European Commission has said that it has opened in-depth inquiry into the transfer of cable infrastructure to French cable operator Numericable. It wants to verify whether the transfer of public cable infrastructure between 2003 and 2006 by several French municipalities to Numericable was in line with EU state aid rules and given that Numericable got this infrastructure for free, it looks like they may not have been. Potential remedies will involve giving them back to be sold at open market rates, or paying some cash to Brussels. Numericable controls very close to 100% of all cable in France, so no-one else would buy them.
Liberty Global chairman John Malone has come out in the aftermath of losing out to Vodafone in its quest to buy German Cable company Kabel Deutschland Group and said that opportunities in northern Europe are now limited, and that it will focus on the south. We disagree and reckon there are plenty of opportuntiies in Scandinavia. Given there is no cable in Italy can means it will take a look at heavily discounted cable players in Portugal and Spain and also in Latin America. That makes Ono and Zon immediate targets. Zon is dominant in Portuguese pay TV with 1.6 million homes, with a 50% market share, mostly cable with some satellite for its TV Cabo service. In Spain Ono has around 860,000 cable TV customers, a market share of some 21% with a number of smaller cable companies in need of tidying up with perhaps another 400,000 TV homes. Numericable in France was owned by Malone before and he clearly does not like this property, which shed subscribers rapidly, before he offloaded it into private equity hands. It is also possible that Malone will begin buying in the US.
Indonesian DTH market leader MNC Sky Vision has agreed a multi-year deal for capacity on the SES-7 satellite, to power a future Chinese language package from the Indovision brand. The package, which will offer over 12 Chinese language channels, will use Ku-band at an orbital location of 108.2 degrees East and allow Indovision to increase its number of subscribers from its current level of around 2 million.
The HomeGrid Forum, the industry alliance supporting the development of Gigabit Home Networking (G.hn), has awarded HomePNA certification to 12 new products this week, bringing the total number of certified products to 96. The 12 new products come from 7 vendors, including set tops from Arris and Kaon Media, residential gateways from ZyXEL and Pace, an Ethernet to HomePNA bridge from Cameo, ONT’s from Calix, and a new reference board from Sigma Designs.
Quebecor Media subsidiary Videotron will try to test the theatrical release status quo by going straight to the consumer’s device with the film ‘Only God Forgives’ on the same day it is launched in cinemas. Viewers will be able to watch the film on the illico tv channel, as well as online at illico.tv and on the illico mobile service. Starring Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott-Thomas, ‘Only God Forgives’ will be available from July 19. If this is successful and leads to Videotron doing the same for other films, it will only be a matter of time before others start doing it, and traditional cinema will begin to look even more fragile than it does already.
UK set top maker Amino came out with its results just after we went to press last week, with stunning numbers, not so much in revenue improvements, which was flat at £20.1 million for the half year, but with profit up from £200,000 to £2.6 million, and a massive rise in its bank balance to £18.2 million. It cited wins in North America as well as emerging markets and says it continues to do well in pure OTT. Amino is working on a home media center which will become generally available at the end of the year. It also says it has shorter lead times because its supply chain is shorter, and that helped it win some orders.