Very quietly the IEEE 1905 standard for interconnection between WiFi, Powerline and coaxial cable using MoCA, was passed about two months ago and published last month. We understand that nothing much has been released because one of the vendors is about to sign a tier 1 customer win. MStar Semiconductor is the only supplier so far to announce that the 1905.1 standard will be included in its product line, in its HomePlug powerline solution, its HomePlug/Ethernet Bridge its HomePlug/Wi-Fi Extender reference designs.
The Wall Street Journal says that Liberty Global is putting Chellomedia up for sale, hoping to raise $800 million or more. This has been speculated on a number of occasions in the past, but CEO Mike Fries has always insisted that he is happy owning the content business right now, but that things may change. Virgin Media gives it a little more scale, and therefore buying power, and it really doesn’t need to keep anything if it’s not as profitable as the main business, but our guess would be that it holds too much debt right now and it is looking at non-core assets to reduce this, because of pressure on its share price. Virgin got out of the content business a while back, and this might be aligning their strategies.
The Marbridge Daily which comes out with tons of Chinese news, much of it not relevant to the west, said this week that BesTV New Media, a subsidiary of the Shanghai Media Group, has formed an IPTV joint venture with CNTV, the online TV service operated by broadcaster China Central Television. It looks like a political decision to us, and puts a lot of content power in very few hands for IPTV in China.
Digital TV Europe said this week that Slovak Telekom has bought the Romania-based RCS & RDS Slovak TV business DigiTV. This unit of the far flung RCS &RDS empire has been underperforming for years, ever since CS Link and Sky Link launched with a pre-pay and pay as you go satellite service, now owned by M7 Group. RCS & RDS lost around 100,000 subscribers in 2011, and a similar number in 2012, so that it only has around 200,000 subscribers, compared to M7 Group which was in about 1.5 million homes across Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but quite of a lot of these just bought a smart card, and only purchased content occasionally. We estimate paying M& customers are around 400,000 in Slovakia, and that RCS & RDS there is non-viable on its own.
Russian operator Rostelecom says that its revenues for the quarter fell 10% to 77 billion Rubles, around $2.5 billion, but that its broadband subscribers rose 12% to 9.5 million, with fiber connections doubling to 3.1 million and pay TV subs went up 13% to 6.8 million, with mobile rising just 3% to 13.6 million. The company said that it has built its 3G plus network in 24 Russian regions. The company said that building networks would slow profitability in the medium term.
US researcher the Leightman Research Group says that North American pay TV subs have fallen for the first time ever, despite the fact that most of us ran this headline two years ago. It counted the top 13 operators which it says account for 94% of the market and concluded that they added 195,000 net video subscribers in Q1. But this was a fall from a 445,000 gain in Q1 2012, and was not enough to offset subscriber losses from Q2 and Q3 2012. In total it says that US subs are off 80,000 subscribers over the past year. It put the shift down to saturation, a free to air renaissance and Netflix, but says the market will recover. It won’t.
Intertrust Technologies has announced ExpressPlay, a one stop shop for content protection, in a system-as-a-service which it says protects video, audio, ebooks and games. It works with Marlin-enabled connected TVs and set-tops and with iOS and Android apps. Intertrust says it has built an embedded SDK available upon request for device manufacturers, and a content packager for service providers to easily ingest content. ExpressPlay uses the Marlin DRM and MPEG DASH as well as HLS.
UK broadband researcher Point Topic has done its sums and says that the European Union could bring super-fast broadband to its target levels with a spend of just €80bn, rather than the €270bn which the European Commission previously estimated. Super-fast broadband is defined as 30Mbps of data downstream and above, and the EU wants every European home to have access to these by 2020. The cost reduction is because Point Topic’s says it is already in reach for 50% of homes, and of course Vectoring gets us there faster and cheaper for DSL.
Multimedia over coax (MoCA) remains dominant in the home networking market which Infonetics estimates reached $4.9bn in the second half of 2012, up 5%. Much of the growth was in MoCA installations in the US
Dish continues to be on the offensive in its bid to win the hand of Sprint. It followed up its comments about Softbank plans to replace $1billion of Huawei equipment at Clearwire, with more jibes about US national security. It had initially said that Sprint was a national strategic asset, and Softbank had come back saying that foreign investment was common, take Vodafone in Verizon, and T-Mobile, but Dish replied that neither of those control a national fiber backbone serving national security interests including defense, law enforcement and other sensitive governmental operations.