We said a while back that UK regulator Ofcom had decided to regulate British Telecom’s VULA access, broadband provided on a wholesale and virtual basis i.e. a guaranteed amount of bandwidth to each wholesale customer. Ofcom worked on the basis of BT leaving sufficient margin for the wholesaler to make profit, and included in the calculation the costs of free TV services such as BT Sport, the channel it gives away to Broadband customers. The European Commission has since pointed out that it charged the costs of the sport over a single year, but should have charged it over the lifetime of a typical connection. Either way BT was well within the VULA margins, and now as Ofcom adjusts its formula, it will be even further under those margins giving it room for maneuver. But this clarifies how bundled content, with broadband from incumbents, must be treated in Europe.
SK Broadband in Korea has bought into the Arris CCAP product range, its E6000 Converged Edge Router, in order to push out 1 Gbps broadband in Korea. This will also enable a 4K TV service already announced. SK Broadband currently serves just 2.6 million homes with what we understand is an IPTV service, not a cable service which would usually use CCAP, so the last hop must be fiber or G.Fast.
Austrian public broadcaster ORF has expanded its VoD service called Flimmit and introduced a flat fee subscription, supposedly to defend against Netflix. It has 4,000 German-language movies and must also go up against local rivals maxdome and Sky Snap as well as Netflix and other global rivals. One way is to focus on a higher percentage of local content including many of its own archives. ORF owned just 25% of Flimmit, but is now taking that up to 88%. So far it has just 20,000 customers. The service will now cost €50 a year or €7.50 a month. Or €20 for 3 months, or the customer can stay with the previous PPV business model.
Thomson Video Networks this week joined the list of encoder players who can operate from the cloud, with a new virtualized edition of its ViBE VS7000 multi-screen and HEVC encoder. We hope to bring you a strategy piece from Thomson on this shift next week. The idea is to run a single copy of its MediaFlex video operating system to control all cloud instances of the encoder offering load balancing and failover management.
We have a lot of good rivals to Rethink services out there, but Frost and Sullivan just isn’t one of them. Almost as proof F&S has come out this week saying that Envivio has been awarded the 2014 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Leadership in the Live Video Transcoding Market, capturing the highest revenue share. In the immediate last quarter (new Envivio numbers are out later today) it fell to $9 million, from over $11 million last time and more the time before. It is on track for its lowest revenue in three years. So how can it be awarded a revenue award. Perhaps F&S has finally researched 2011, when Envivio was winning tons of accounts or it has next quarters numbers before anyone else – which would be illegal and anyway, we doubt they are going to be that good.
LiveU has won the Shanghai Media Group as one of the customers for its bonding transmission technology, using its lightweight LU500 backpack for its newsgathering operations. Its first use goes back to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and it is also used to support the Washington news reporting division, as well as Airshow China, the Australian Open Tennis Championships, the AFC Asian soccer Cup and the 17th Asian Games in Incheon.
Vodafone in the Czech Republic has brought a suit against O2 Czech for abuse of dominant position in broadband and is seeking 385 million Czech Koruna ($15m) in costs and damages, because it was forced to pay exorbitant rates for wholesale DSL, preventing it from offering prices that could compete with O2 Czech Republic. This problem has gone on for as long as we can remember with a number of broadband rivals withdrawing from the broadband market in the Czech republic because of it. It must be pointed out that this practice was in place when Telefonica owned this business, and even before it bought into it. But Telefonica sold it to local interests last year. We wonder when the European commission will step in?
Orange said this week it will invest €15 billion in capex for its fixed line networks between now and 2018, prioritizing high-speed broadband, and it laid out plans to generate an extra €1 billion in annual revenues from services in the IoT and M2M, and mobile financial services sectors, as the CEO laid out a 5 year plan to investors that led on a converged services push and cost cutting. Stephane Richard CEO also said he would roll out a new brand. Orange already has 13 million users of its Orange Money service in the Middle East and Africa and aims to increase this to 30 million by 2018. Richard also said that in 2017 when the Orange roaming deal was due with Iliad’s Free, he would rather not renew it. Depends on how much money it is paying surely.
In the US, ABC News has launched its own streaming channel on Roku players and Roku-powered TV models, as well as VoD to it archive.
Renowned UK broadcaster Andrew Neil, stood up at a conference this week and said that UHD will strengthen traditional TV. Neil is a news journalist first and foremost who has built a reputation as a pundit and interviewer, but was embarrassed a few years back when he took part in a TV program “Test the Nation,” basically a live IQ test. The celebrities team did very badly, with a high score of 126 and Neil’s trailing in the wake among an undistinguished group of celebrities, not too far above the national average. He has spent the intervening years trying to ban the mention of his real score and Google can no longer find it. This is not a man you would want predicting our industry’s future. Neil made his comments in a keynote address at the SES Satellite Monitor in London.
Sky has invested another €4.7 million in 1Mainstream, an OTT startup with an automated multiscreen ABR platform, as convertible debt. Sky has already spent just under €2 million in the company back in 2013. It uses the 1Mainstream platform for Sky News and Now TV.
This week Dish Network’s Sling TV released its app for Xbox One, joining devices such as the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Roku players Android and iOS devices as well as Macs and PCs. The service also added A&E Networks TV channels, which will come on stream by the end of March.
Rovi said this week that it has renewed its IPG product and patent portfolio license agreement with Sharp, one of Japan’s top TV manufacturers. The license provides Sharp with access to Rovi’s discovery capabilities and Rovi’s G-Guide HTML in Japanese markets, for its popular Aquos TV brand. Interestingly Rovi is putting more and more of its IPG patents into deals with its other technology, which might lead to less partners taking it to court to invalidate its IPG patents, as has happened too frequently in Europe.
Nanosys, which is a manufacturer of materials using in making quantum Dot TV displays has doubled its manufacturing capacity to 25 tons a year which will enable the company to produce enough materials to power over 6 million 60 inch UHD TVs a year.
Sky plans to build out its VoD and OTT offerings in Germany and Italy based on what it is doing in the UK, said one of its senior executives talking at a financial event this week. On demand content has been a massive success for Sky UK, with pay content outstripping free to air by a ratio of two to one and it wants to copy this in Italy and Germany by bringing out connected net top boxes like the one it uses from Roku in the UK. It will also introduce program Restart (similar to Start Over in the US). Sky says it has achieved revenue growth of 90% year-on-year in its Sky Store and this too will move to its other territories.
We did ask the question of what will Altice do with its Cabovisão cable operator in Portugal if it landed Portugal Telecom and it has now confirmed that operation is up for sale to ensure that regulators have no reason not to approve its Portugal Telecom acquisition. It bought the business for a song from Canada’s Cogeco in the height of the Euro zone crisis, which had been bleeding cash for a while, but we imagine it is somewhat healthier now.
Recommendations and search play XroadMedia has announced a partnership with French middleware company Wyplay, whereby Ncanto, The XroadMedia cloud based, content discovery solution, will become available to the “Frog by WyPlay” development community.