UK market researcher ResearchNow says that a study of 3000 random TV viewers it did for TV Genius in the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden reveals that the EPG has little influence over the content they choose. It is traditional media such as newspapers and magazines which lead the content discovery process, as well as online sources or on-screen trailers. 81% of respondents, and 96% in the UK, use the EPG but only 3% said the EPG helped decide what to watch. The suggestion is that the EPG need enhancements like those offered by TV Genius no doubt.
Norway’s SnapTV says it will launch a browser-based user interface at IBC for IPTV services, which will accelerate time to market for new services and channels. Not sure that using a browser is anything new, if anything the browser suppliers in IPTV want to offer more. What we think Snap is saying is that a browser interface transfers straight to a PC offering an EPG of multicast TV and radio channels via a web portal.
There is a time in any technology when all the VC’s pile in, on the off chance that they can make a killing. Usually it is when the components for the technology go into larger volumes and the price of market entry is temporarily lower. That’s the case with ereaders right now and a new company Kno, which already makes ereaders and what it calls a digital learning platform, has just landed another $46 million in equity and debt financing in the hope it can be the start up to gatecrash a party currently dominated by Amazon and Sony. Kno was founded in 2009 and is developing a two-panel, touch-screen e-book reader designed for students, and incorporates digital textbooks, note-taking and sharing. Its first product is due to come out later this year.
VoD specialist SeaChange International said its second quarter revenues were $51.6 million, 11% higher than a year ago. Net income was $3.5 million compared with a loss of $0.4 million last time. Its cash has dwindled from $85.6 million to $76.3 million in a year but it has no debt, mostly the money has gone down due to stock repurchasing. The bulk of its improvement came in software sales of eventIS and VividLogic product lines, while servers and storage revenues fell to $10.3 million down $1.5 million on last year.
LG Electronics stood up at the IFA last week in Berlin and promised to sell over 40 million flat-screen television sets, both in the high and low end next year in a major expansion. It also showed its new Lex8 with a 31 inch OLED screen, a remarkable achievement while others have struggled keeping up with handset sized OLED screens, at around 4 inches, thought to be the largest viable screen size for volume manufacture currently. LG claimed it has an infinite contrast ratio and operates using its TruMotion technology in 400Hz, which it says will keep 3D images smooth. It is also DNLA certified and only 2.9mm thick. It will come out in March with a likely top of the range price tag.
French encoder specialist Ateme will launched its Titan Live transcoding system at IBC which it says already supports large scale pay-TV VoD deployments in North-America and Europe. The core transcoding engine, the Kyrion File Encoder, is widely used to create files for web and mobile delivery and the introduction of Titan Live supports real time IP to IP transcoding and delivers web TV and mobile TV profiles for three screen services. Ateme is best known for Contribution encoding to move digital video around for editing before playout. Ateme will also announce a partnership with Civoluton, the old Philips digital watermarking and fingerprinting arm for VoD service protection. They have integrated Civolution’s NexGuard with Kyrion File Encoder.
Inlet Technologies will showcase a new version of its Spinnaker steaming services including closed captioning, sub-titling and multi-language support, as well as support for Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM, local and managed archiving, multi-camera support, and low latency. New H.264 quality options have also been added, providing flexibility for customers who wish to tailor video output quality. Spinnaker has support for Microsoft IIS Smooth Streaming, Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming and HTTP Adaptive Streaming to Apple’s iPhone and iPad will also be on display.
Widevine said last week that it was awarded its 63rd patent which is all about transcoding including encryption, encoding, and encapsulation. The process in question takes HD TV and repurposes it to be delivered over the public internet. There are tons of transcoding patents out there, and Dilithium Networks holds quite a few, so this should be just one specific method for transcoding, not all possible such methods.
Telefonica says that it will roll out a national FTTH network in Chile to reach around 700,000 households and costing $2.5 billion over the next four years. The first phase starts in Chile’s Bio Bio region, and will connect 50,000 homes there, offering consumers speeds between 40 and 100 Mbps and delivering, among other things, IPTV.
The Czech antimonopoly office plans to investigate whether Telefonica’s O2 has abused a dominant position in high speed internet connections in the country, by overcharging. The company has not acknowledged to local newspapers any approach about an investigation from the antimonopoly office. Under local laws the office does not have to tell Telefonica that it is being investigated so that doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.
The US Justice Department has decided to investigate Google’s $700 million purchase of travel software supplier ITA, on potential anti-trust issues. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department is worried that Google will have too much control over the online travel industry.
US cable equipment maker Arris said that its new Touchstone Telephony Gateway, the TG852G has been awarded DOCSIS 3.0 certification by CableLabs. The TG852G is the newest Arris wireless gateway with support for up to 8 bonded downstream channels and up to 4 bonded upstream channels, delivering 320 Mbps and 120 Mbps, respectively.
Entone has announced a WebVOD hybrid TV system which it says is integrated with leading middleware systems, and is aimed at adding web based VoD over the internet to existing IPTV services. It says that the service has already been used to allow Vudu access to both Vudu Movies and Vudu Apps via Entone devices. The Entone WebVOD application is immediately available in all US markets.
Sweden’s Dreampark IPTV middleware company says it has provided middleware to Maxisat, Finland. Maxisat reckons its is the first operator in Finland offering TV and OTT using a scalable vector graphics (SVG) client allowing for HD user interfaces. The front-end system delivered by Dreampark is based on the Dreamgallery Next Generation TV experience.
Viaccess, the France Telecom subsidiary which designs and manages its conditional access, and its subsidiary Orca Interactive, an IPTV middleware firm, said they will power Swedish broadcaster Boxer’s hybrid services which will offer live premium content and VoD and the system will be shown at IBC this week. Boxer will use internet delivered VoD content alongside its new DVB-T2 multiplex.
Logicways says it will introduce its second version of PushVOD called PushVOD 2.0, at IBC in Amsterdam this week.
WiFi router firm Netgear and internet video delivery company Zixi will introduce its own OTT video systems in partnership. Zixi says it has software to make any website or corporate network into a broadcasting hub. offering HD video. The system will be launched at IBC this week. The combined system uses the Netgear NeoTV 550 HD Media Player and the Zixi Video Operating System (ZVOS). Given the number of people at IBC launching OTT systems, we’re not quite sure where this one fits in.
Both Droid Guy and Android Guys, two Android fansites, are saying that Verizon is about to dump Google search from its phones, and do a deal with Microsoft Bing. This doesn’t strike us as very wise. People will just install their own shortcuts to Google and consider leaving Verizon.
Harmonic’s Electra 8000 universal broadcast encoder has now supported 10,000 channels since its launch in June 2009, mostly at broadcast, satellite, Telco and cable operators around the world, to power systems including 3D, HD, SD, MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-2 and offering picture-in-picture.
A prediction has come out from In-Stat that says mobile computing devices, including tablets, mini-notes (netbooks and smartbooks) and notebook PCs will grow at a 19.1% CAGR through 2014 and account for over 400 million units. What it doesn’t say is what percentage of them will be tablets. Now that’s what we call a cop out.
The social network Ping that was launched with new iPhones and Apple TV last week, hit 1 million users in 48 hours ‘ but then again Apple lovers always were going to do that. It will be interesting if it continues to grow outside the loyal Apple fan base.
US encoder maker Harmonic also said it has supplied a head end to On Digital Media to power its new TopTV pay TV service in South Africa. The headend system includes Harmonic’s Electra 5400 MPEG-4 AVC multi-channel encoders and the ProStream 1000 stream processing platform with DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing.
Ericsson says that it has a new Media Delivery Network (so would that be a CDN, but by another name?) for the delivery of video over IP for multi-channel TV, video-on-demand and over-the-top video content from the same core infrastructure. It seems to be saying that it will combine a content distribution network with its broader TV portfolio, which is mostly encoders, so we assume it will be Tandberg transcoders dropped into the network, to cope with different forms of video creation.
Set top company Pace, in the UK, says that it has agreed terms for the money that it needs to borrow in order to buy US home gateway firm 2Wire. It was a last condition on its previous offer to buy the company and has now been met.