Motorola Ventures has taken a strategic investment in TuneWiki, a
supplier of social media, music player and related applications for handsets. Motorola was the lead investor and was joined by Intellect Capital Ventures, part of TeliaSonera, as well as HillsVen Capital and Novel TMT. TuneWiki’s previous venture capital investor, Benchmark Israel, also participated in the round. TuneWiki focuses on the use of song lyrics, as well as an upcoming mobile music game.
BSkyB has sold 404 million shares in ITV, which it picked up when it tried to stop Virgin buying ITV. It amounts to 10.4% of ITV, and is part of an agreement with the Government to offload the shares over time. Sky picked up £196 million for the sale, but will Sky will retain 7.5% of ITV. The shares originally cost the company £940 million in 2006.
Global IP Solutions (GIPS) says that it is first to enable video chat and video conferencing to iPhone developers so that they can embed these features into their applications. It is built around the GIPS VideoEngine Mobile and resolves issues such as delay, jitter and echo.
Advanced TV news tells us that soon UK broadcasters and program makers will be able to accept payment for product placement, a practice that is currently outlawed in the UK. The culture minister has made it clear that the UK Government will enact legislation to allow it, as have a number of other EU states in recent years. The legislation will not allow it for alcoholic drinks, foods with high levels of fat, medicines, gambling and smoking and children’s programming will be exempt.
IMS Research’s in the US says that over-the-top content will become an extension of pay TV and stand-alone subscription packages, but will not become ubiquitous until at least 2015. It may eventually present a threat to Pay TV operators says IMS, but not yet.
We have been warned from day one that Blu-ray will only slowly take over from the humble DVD, but the chip market tells us that this is happening faster that almost anybody imagined. Already In-Stat says that Blu-ray chips have overtaken DVD chips by revenue and will go on to account for nearly three quarters of combined player semiconductor revenues by 2013.
NDS announced this week that a third company TV Genius, has joined its NDS Recommendations Engine Partner Program. Existing partners are Jinni and ThinkAnalytics. NDS will now offer its customers the TV Genius recommendations services. TV Genius offers a three-screen system based on over 20 deployments in seven countries.
Dilithium, the mobile video player, has just launched Galaxy, which it calls an integrated mobile video suite which enables video apps. It allows service providers to deploy interoperable video applications. Galaxy will support all kinds of video codec, from both packet switched and circuit switched networks, whether they are interactive or one way. Dilithium has previously offered real time network transcoding appliances and was critical in developing the ITU standard for Media Oriented Acceleration Negotiations, whereby any mobile device can set up to receive video in under 1 second.
The biggest cableco in the Netherlands, Ziggo, says it now has 1 million telephony customers, about one in three of the 3.2 million homes it reaches. To celebrate, Ziggo will give free calls to all Dutch fixed line numbers on Valentines day.
US researcher comScore says that over the past three months in the US mobile Motorola has remained the top handset manufacturer with 23.5% percent market share, with RIM the leading smartphone platform with a 41.6% share. It says that 234 million people use mobiles (there are around 280 million devices we think) and Motorola is top ranked, LG second with 21.9% and Samsung third on 21.2%. Nokia has just 9.2% and RIM 7%.
UK IPTV set top specialist Amino Technologies said this week that it made a loss of £8.72 million on £25 million of revenue, down from last year’s £31.9 million. The company had already said that it had a challenging start to the year, and now it has cut its cost base to £11 million, below its 2008 cost level. It shipped 341,000 devices compared to 2008’s 484,000, though many more of them were HD, the company said. It still has over £9 million in the bank, only lost £5.95 million in operating losses before exceptional items, and said it improved in the second half with significant wins at Tele2, Telecom Serbia, ICE and Pioneer Telecom. Amino said that it has an undisclosed significant win of a hybrid, over the top, device with a tier 1 player, using the new Amino Freedom which is built with the Intel Atom processor CE4100.