Broadcom rolled out all manner of specialist Chinese chips ahead of the China Content Broadcasting Network show organized by the State Administration of Radio Film & Television (SARFT) for this week, including a UHD set top SOC, a first satellite chip to suit China’s DTH market, a HomePlug chip for MDUs and a new Chinese version of DOCSIS 3. The 4Kp60 SoC based on the 7252 that has been so successful already has its first Chinese order with the Inspur Group, Shandong Cable Network’s primary systems integrator. The new satellite chip has support for the AVS+ coding standard.
According to RapidTV News, Chinese VoD service YOU On Demand will extend its OTT service through a new partnership with Galaxy Internet Television, itself a joint venture between China National Radio, Jiangsu Television Station, Baidu’s iQiyi, and Dr Peng Telecom Media Group. It will launch in April. YOU On Demand originally moved from cable TV to OTT a few years ago by working with Future TV, a subsidiary of China Network Television.
The Australian Financial Review says that Discovery Communications has pulled out of the talks we reported recently to buy Network Ten in Australia. The plan was for it to buy it in conjunction with pay TV player Foxtel with Discovery holding 85.01%. Instead Network Ten wanted to simply sell 14.99% to Discovery and give it a seat on the board, as other shareholders also wanted to increase their holdings. Discovery also lowered its bid, due to commercial uncertainty surrounding Network Ten, and in the end it walked away leaving Network Ten in “continuing discussions” with local financiers.
A report from Digital TV Research on North American pay TV says that revenues from subscription and VoD will fall by 11.7% between 2014 and 2020. Though how it can calculate the effect of all these new OTT services, we have no idea. The report says that American pay TV revenues peaked at $103 billion in 2013 and will fall by $12 billion to $90.71 billion by 2020. Cable will lose the most at $13 billion; with analog falling to zero and digital falling by $9.3 billion; satellite will drop by just $1.23 billion, and IPTV revenues will rise by $2.17 billion and Satellite TV will overtake cable to become the largest pay TV platform in North America by 2019. Revenues from OTT services are expected to climb from $6.85 billion in 2014 to $10.39 billion in 2020.
The Broadband Forum this week said that six new G-PON devices have undergone official certification through its G-PON Optical Network Unit Certification Program from manufacturers Adtran, Huawei, Marvell, Sagemcom and Tecom, just one month after the previous tranche of six products achieved certification and brings the total of named certified devices to 26.
Telefonica has finalized the sale of the UK O2 mobile network to Three owner, Hutchison Whampoa, for £10.25 billion reaching a definitive agreement, which it says will create the UK’s biggest mobile operator. The completion of the deal is subject to regulatory approval and while that may take a long time, if BT can buy EE, then this deal should be fine, although it could end up with a 41% market share—perhaps too dominant.
US DTH leader DirecTV said it plans between 50 and 70 live broadcast channels in 4K UHD by 2020. “4K is the killer app for satellite, and it should be the killer app for this whole conference,” said Philip Goswitz, senior VP, video, space and communications for DirecTV, speaking at the recent Satellite 2015 conference.
Zoo Digital says it has processed 50 million subtitles and captions for major media producers and distributors. It offers production and management services for subtitling offering a full service approach, powered by innovative Zoosubs and Zoocore technology, to produce, manage, store and repurpose new and existing materials for worldwide release.
Chinese cable firm Dalian Tiantu Cable Television Network, has bought a Thomson Video Networks’ ViBE VS7000 video encoding system and a Sapphire MPEG stream server to provide HEVC encoding and playout for its new 4K linear channel.
A blog post at LiveRail, the ad serving specialist which reportedly cost Facebook around $500 million to acquire last July, hints at a campaign to replace the humble cookie with Facebook data within second screen apps. Its new in-App advertising system will launch with initial test partners using the “people-based marketing capabilities” built from Facebook data A+E Networks, Dailymotion, and Univision.
US researcher ABI Research said this week that the worldwide pay TV market grew at a steady rate of 4% during 2014 and reached 923.5 million subscribers. However weak currency exchange rates meant a lower revenue growth to $257 billion. Subscribers are expected to pass 1.1 billion subscribers in 2020 with a CAGR of just 2.7% with service revenues of $313 billion by 2020. Cable and terrestrial TV markets had less growth in 2014 compared to satellite and IPTV. But HD penetration is increasing across all pay TV platforms, and now 44% of worldwide pay TV subscribers were HD subscribers.
Movie service EPIX this week said it will launch an app on the Xbox One for its four channels EPIX, EPIX 2, EPIX 3 and EPIX Drive In, plus an on demand offering of a few thousand movies. The EPIX app was first launched on Xbox 360 in December 2011 and now it has moved to the Xbox One.
An Al Jazeera company BeIn Media Group, is in negotiations to buy Turkish satellite network Digiturk, said Reuters this week, citing three sources familiar with the talks, and it is being chased for sports coverage. The Qatar based media giant has been chasing Digiturk for some years and once tabled a $1 billion purchase, which never went ahead. Digiturk has broadcast rights for Turkey’s top soccer league until the end of the 2016-2017 season. It is 53% owned by Turkey’s Cukurova Holdings and 47 percent owned by US private equity group Providence Equity Partners.