Broadcom and Qualcomm continue to fight it out in a series of patent and licensing lawsuits, and both scored some points last week in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In Broadcom’s favor, the appeals court vacated part of an International Trade Commission ruling that had been previously found in Qualcomm’s favor. This ruling was that eight Qualcomm chip products did not violate a Broadcom patent for sending and receiving RF signals. The case has now returned to the ITC. However, the court upheld the ITC ruling in Qualcomm’s favor pertaining to the other seven chips, affirming that those seven products did not infringe on Broadcom’s patent. Also in Qualcomm’s favor, the court upheld another ITC ruling that the eight Qualcomm chips do not violate a Broadcom patent pertaining to power saving.
Sri Lanka Telecom has launched an IPTV service from its subsidiary SLT VisionCom. Visioncom says it will target reaching 7,000 customers by the end of the year and 100,000 customers in three years. Software and equipment is understood to have come from UTStarcom.
Minerva Networks says Clarksville, Tennessee Department of Electricity has launched IPTV services using its iTVManager under the name of CDE Lightband TV. It had previously launched the service with Kasenna LivingRoom middleware, but could not get HD and DVR working with it, so switched, although it has kept the Kasenna VoD servers and Amino set tops.
If, like me, you’ve had some trouble seeing the point of Bluetooth, take a look at this latest little idea from Sony Ericsson. It’s a wristwatch linked by Bluetooth to your handset, which vibrates and shows who’s calling. It is the MBW-200, with a super clear OLED display, supposed to be for ladies that have their handset in their handbag and either can’t find it in time to answer it, or hate it when they finally find it and it’s a call they don’t want to take. Of course the idea is not entirely for women, how many times have you seen anxious executives taking out their handsets, putting them on vibrate and staring at them during business meetings, but Sony Ericsson launched a version a year ago and now wants to feminize the design to attract more ladies.
Sony Computer Entertainment this week released Life with PlayStation worldwide. The service has its own TV channel called Live Channel and this takes users in through a world map using the dimensions of place and time. This is a picture of the world at any point in time and PS3 users can drill down using data from a US Space Science Center, The Weather Channel, Google News, as well as live camera images provided mostly by The Earth Television Network, of nearly 60 cities around the world. The Channel is free of charge to PS3 users. Live Channel will also support the Folding@home distributed computing project run by Stanford University which aims to understand and model protein folding by borrowing processing cycles from remote computers.
Ad-supported MVNO Blyk says it has doubled customers to 200,000 during the past 5 months. It started a year ago as an idea from Finland but launched in the UK in 2007, targeting 16 to 24 year olds and issues six advertising messages a day. Blyk claims that 25% of those who receive ads respond to them. Blyk will launch in the Netherlands in late 2008 and in Germany, Spain and Belgium in 2009.
Apple’s App Store has upset customers by rejecting Podcaster, an iPhone application which lets users download podcasts directly to the phone, bypassing iTunes. The reason given was that it duplicates the functionality of the podcast section of iTunes. Apple has made no clear guidelines available for inclusion in the App Store. So it looks like a different platform than iPhone will be the beneficiary of this application.
IDC forecasts that Asia Pacific shipments of dedicated MP3 players will slow from 8.4% last year to 6.3% in 2008, and drop to 4.4% in 2009. The prediction does not include Japan. IDC reckons shipments will grow by 0.6% in 2012 after which they will presumably start declining. Obviously the handset is the main culprit, but larger, less developed markets like India and China still offer potential for growth.
Advanced Television reports that Spanish TV network Antena has a deal with Vodafone to allow its 3G customers to watch Antena TV programs on their phones with some 70% of Antena 3 programs being made available, all of the content which doesn’t have complex rights issues. The service will be free of charge until November and then cost €4 a month.
The Google search lead just gets bigger and bigger and must now be getting to the point where it must be considered a monopoly. The latest figures from comScore show that Google had 63% of all searches, up more than a full percentage point from last quarter.
Brazilian regulator Anatel has authorised telco Oi to offer a DTH TV service throughout the country and Oi has promised to provide a channel free of charge to the Ministry of Health.
A US court is being asked to rule that using 30 seconds of music preview amounts to ‘fair use’ in copyright terms and that music companies cannot charge a royalty for it. The performing rights organization ASCAP wants to charge a public performance royalty, while trade group Digital Media Association, which represents online retailers including Apple and Amazon wants the court to intervene.
Yahoo and RealNetwork’s Rhapsody music service are to jointly launch a new service whereby people using Yahoo to search for a specific song may play it back in full, using Rhapsody’s FoxyTunes Player. A shortcut to the player will be included in each search, but each user will be limited to 25 free full length tracks a month and then cut back to 30 seconds of each track.
For some reason NDS has decided to issue a press release saying that it has landed the conditional access for Telecom Italia’s IPTV system. We’re not sure if and when this first came out, but it has been widely know for a while now as they both have around 200,000 customers. The service has perhaps been upgraded recently because the release says that the protection extends to delivery to set-top boxes, PCs, mobile phones, portable media players (PMPs) and removable media and not all of those were available back when the service launched.
Cryptography Research (the name describes perfectly what it does) has settled with Visa on rights to use its patent portfolio, which includes defenses against Differential Power Analysis. The two were gathering themselves for a legal battle before the settlement was announced.
One of our frequent correspondents tells us that in the same way that High Definition IPTV over copper wires has a hard time dealing with visual artifacts because of inherent signal to noise ratio issues, Flash memory will not be a simple answer to carrying and storing HD video in VoD servers or within devices. He reckons that NAND has a slew of obscure technical issues that will make playback from NAND almost as trouble strewn as HD over copper and says the same issues will effect Video Servers, DVRs which use Flash memory (such as those sold be Swedish company Edgeware) and PCs that do away with hard disks drives in favor of Flash.
Researcher Informa forecasts pay-TV revenues in Latin America will reach $22.8 billion by 2013, double those of 2007. It predicts digital TV subscriptions to rise to 30.3 million by the end of 2013 compared with 8.4 million in 2007 with Telefonica and Telmex battling for dominance across DTH, cable, MMDS and IPTV.
The US Dish Network has extended its deal for AT&T to continue reselling its pay TV services both separately and as a part of AT&T’s Homezone service, for one month further, until the end of January 2009. This might mean that they are both getting extra time for more rounds of negotiations. AT&T said some time ago that it wanted to concentrate on working with either Dish or DirecTV, and so issued notice to cancel both which it was deciding which.