Belkin has begun to market through Amazon the breakthrough wireless HDMI devices which are based on Amimon’s WHDI chipset which can send multiple HD signals around a home using MIMO antennas and a 40 MHz wide OFDM carrier. The work came to the fore in July after it got financial backing from Motorola and then signed up Sharp, Sony, Samsung and Hitachi to use the technology. It is loosely based on 802.11n wi-fi technology with some extensions.
French transmitter operator TDF says that its will introduce the idea of push VoD over digital terrestrial networks in early 2009 in France. Several broadcasters are thought to have expressed an interest. The idea is to send an overnight signal on DTT and store the movies on the hard disk of a DVR. The usual suspects in France TF1, France Television and M6 are said to want to use it to lower their DSL delivery of VoD content. Back in September Digita, the Finnish company owned by TDF, tested push VOD over the Finnish DTT network.
Troubled Flash memory maker SanDisk has cut 450 staff, amounting to 15% of its workforce. The company had rising losses which reached $155 million last quarter and is fighting in a business with huge over-supply capacity. It recently fought off a hostile bid to take it over from Samsung. Given its strategic position in the industry, expect another takeover bid of some kind soon if this continues. SanDisk also cut its capex by $500 million for the coming year and will cut even further in 2009.
US trials of the draft standard for mobile television, ATSC M/H, have shown good results, according to US broadcaster Ion Media Networks.
Ion conducted trials in Chicago and Denver and said it found it quite easy to set up two mobile channels, and that reception was better than expected. Ion Media’s stations, WCPX and KPXC, have been multicasting two mobile channels since August, using hardware from LG Electronics and Harris. The broadcaster said: ‘We’re seeing fantastic reception out to as far as 40 miles from transmitters, and beyond that we have good transmission outdoors but it’s not consistent indoors.’ Reception was also good in cars at freeway speeds.
Samsung has, as we have predicted recently, overtaken Motorola as the number one US handset maker in the US, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, taking 22.4% percent of the market, compared to Motorola’s 21.1% share. Motorola is in the process of slashing jobs and repositioning handsets to focus more on Google’s Android platform.
Japan took less flat panel TV screens in October than the same month a year before, down almost 2%, making it one of the first stumbles in the flat TV screen market there, according to local market research firm BCN in Tokyo.
Revenues from mobile phone sales will grow at just 6.8% compound annual growth rate, for the next 5 years according to UK researcher Informa, and will exceed $200 billion by the end of 2013. Emerging markets, including Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) and Africa, will make up the majority global handset market value, with 60% share in 2013, while developed markets will not exceed 2% growth over that time.
Microsoft has added 500,000 new set tops for its Mediaroom software during the past quarter, taking the total number of homes to 2 million, and the total number of set tops to almost 4 million. Microsoft puts it down to operators starting to introduce new services which are differentiating customer offerings, which it says is easy once you have a generic IP delivery channel into the home. At 4 million devices Mediaroom probably finally has a claim to be the most installed software on IPTV systems worldwide.
Both Envivio and Harmonic encoders have been tested and certified to work with Microsoft Mediaroom and announced the fact at Telco TV in Anaheim this week. Both companies had their systems qualified by the Microsoft Mediaroom Interoperability and Qualification Lab.
Orca Interactive, the Iraeli IPTV middkeware company now owned by France’s Viaccess has announced a partnership with Chinese STB vendor, Yuxing, and has a set top integration for the Chinese market. That’s probably not going to do Orca a lot of good since China Telecom controls most of the IPTV there and already has an approved supplier list, which Orca is not on. Yuxing will market these set-top boxes to operators in the Asian region, so probably not China.
China’s leading video-sharing web site, 56.com, will standardize on On2 Technologies’ Flix Engine for its server-side transcoding and publishing platform for all web video uploads using On2’s VP6 codec rather than H.264 and will used Adobe’s Flash video format.
Panasonic executives in Japan are saying that it is in talks with Sanyo which might lead to a merger or strategic alliance. Let’s face it, all CE companies are going through a tough time but if we owned Panasonic we wouldn’t want to take on more CE capacity right now, though it might take them into the handset market. The moves come after Sanyo cut thousands of jobs and sold off a number of unprofitable businesses.
Virgin Media in the UK will reduce headcount by 15%, but very slowly over the next two years to bring down its costs by some £120 million a year. The moves were announced after what the company called an intensive period of review.