Macrovision is selling off the Gemstar magazines and TV channels which are not part of the technology that it sees as have a cross over with its own content protection product lines. Observers reckon it might raise $400 million for the TV Guide Network (a TV station) and the smaller TVG Network (a horse racing channel). Macrovision bought Gemstar for $2.8 billion in April and valued these assets at around $600 million a the time.
TiVo said that it has done a deal with Nero, a German company famous for creating what it calls liquid media, which will allow Nero to build a PC version of TiVo. The two see it as an easy way to extend the TiVo brand into the PC world and also use it as a platform for shifting content to handsets, iPod PlayStation Portable, or burn them to DVD.
RealNetworks has had a temporary restraining order placed on its distributed of RealDVD and this week had that extended by a US Judge until they can have time for a full hearing. The request came from the US movie studios. Real says that it is confident that the Court will determine that RealDVD complies with the DVD CCA license agreement, and that it is not in violation of any copyright laws. But a cursory glance at its defensive filings show it is arguing its product protects DVD content better than the original CSS scrambling system used on DVDs. However, weak or not, it is still illegal to break CSS under the DMCA and it looks like this is another dead product to us
Tandberg Television, now part of Ericsson said that the Special Broadcasting Service in Australia, a multicultural public broadcaster, has selected its iSIS 8000head end architecture for its Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) network. Tandberg said its head-ends are now used for four of the country’s five national digital terrestrial networks.
News Corp’s Sky Italia is facing an investigation by the competition authorities in Italy, according to Advanced TV News. It has to prove that it does not have a dominant position, while we reported last week that Sky is under the same kind of scrutiny in the UK over its control of sports and films. Separately an Italian court has said that Sky Italia cannot impose its set tops on people in a test case held there. Although this was a single civil case, it mirrors developments in Germany where the anti-trust authorities are saying much the same thing to satellite operator Premiere in which News Corp owns shares.
Tiny UK RF chip company Mirics Semiconductor says that its software driven PC based FlexiTV system can now work with ISDB-T, the Japanese digital terrestrial and mobile TV system. FlexiTV is built so that it only has to provide the RF chips in a small USB dongle, and the rest of the system can be handled in software running on the PC processor. Mirics already has software demodulators for DVB-T, FM, T-DMB and DAB. Mirics provides RF chips that can view the spectrum from 150KHz all the way up to 1.9 GHz. In a separate announcement it says that AzureWave, part of Asus in Taiwan, will take the FlexiTV system for the development of a new generation of PC TV receivers.
Qualcomm has gone on record saying that the Nokia settlement was tough and could have really hurt the company, but the remaining Broadcom suit was unlikely to have a material affect on its business. But Broadcom has issued a new suit calling for a declaratory judgment that Qualcomm’s patents are virtually all invalid and that it cannot both give patents to chip companies and then tell operators and handset makers what they can or cannot do with the chips that appear with the technology on. This suit comes perhaps too late to make a difference and looks to us additional like negotiating pressure, as earlier cases get close to courtrooms and settlement talks begin in earnest.
The six biggest UK ISPs, BT, Tiscali, BSkyB, Carphone Warehouse, Orange and Virgin Media are about to begin sending warning letters out under a new Memorandum of Understanding which means they can cut content pirates off from the internet. Each ISP will send notices to up to 1000 subscribers a week who have been engaged in illegal music downloading or uploading
Sony has come out with a new version of its e-book Reader which has its own reading light and touch screen display. The new reader is the PRS-700, and it will around $400 and be available from the end of this month. It has a six-inch screen uses electronic ink for display with and LEDs on either side. It comes with a stylus for making handwritten notes and can hold 350 books in memory.
Jungo, which provides software for residential gateways, said its Open RG software now supports a fast channel-switching feature for IPTV. Jungo’s technology uses an new method for leaving an IGMP multicast known as ‘Aggressive Leave’, it monitors bandwidth and virtual circuits for available resources. The company says the system from Jungo can be used on any off the shelf STB.
UK based record label EMI says it plans to launch its own music and video services for content from its own artists. This will all happen from a web site called EMI.com and will launch by Christmas. If it was ever gong to be successful at that, it would have done it 5 years ago. It’s just not going to work is it.