UK set top box maker Pace reported revenues of £745.5 million and shipped 13.1 million set tops during 2008. Profit was £13.8 million and Pace said the Philips set top business which it acquired during the year contributed £292.9 million in revenues and £8.4 million in profits. Pace reckons that it will continue to grow business through the recession, led by demand for pay-TV services such as HD, PVR and digital terrestrial.
Roku announced in January that it was working towards making its Roku digital video player work with Amazon’s Video On Demand service and now the thing is launched. Roku customers can now rent or buy movies the same day they go to DVD and through Amazon have access to 40,000 of them. The Roku will play them on any TV and connect straight to the internet, but the service is only available in the US.
Fring the social networking community said that it has a version of its software for the new Nokia 5800 and that it’s available immediately. The 5800 is the Nokia first ‘Comes with Music’ device with touch screen controls. Fring has created an early access group of around 100 users to receive R&D versions of the release and provide feedback during further development.
The Kudelski Group wants to buy the remainder of the shares it doesn’t own in OpenTV and will spend $127 million bidding for them. Kudelski is best know for its conditional access division Nagravision and has been in control of the US set top middleware company since October 2006 when it paid $132 million for 74.7% of the voting rights, which only amounted to 26.7% of the total beneficial ownership. Sounds like OpenTV is worth a lot less now than it was when Kudelski took it over.
A US judge has dismissed the patent suit brought by the Gibson Guitar company against Activision over Guitar Hero relating to patents it holds on simulating a musical concert experience. The patent was granted in a virtual reality era (1999) for using a 3D image inside head-mounted displays so that it feels like you’re at a concert and the judge felt that this did not extend to Activision’s video game Guitar Hero. The two companies worked together on Guitar Hero, and the guitars in it look like Gibson models.
Adobe has reached an agreement with three separate Time Warner entities including Turner Broadcasting, Warner Brothers Entertainment, and Home Box Office, in a strategic alliance to collaborate on next generation video and rich media experiences. As part of the alliance, these companies will also collaborate to accelerate the development of digital rights management for the Web and desktop, and work on standardized metadata and audience measurement systems.
We’ll have to wait until the middle of April for the outcome, but the prosecution in Sweden of the Pirate Bay web site, which guided consumers to places where they might download content ‘ some of it pirated, is likely to disappoint. While dramatic gestures of calling for prison terms and multi million dollar fines is all very well ‘ the dismantling of the US Recording Industry Association of America apparatus to legally harass file sharing users, along with moves to DRM free music on legal systems, suggests that this is one of the last big show trials in music piracy and Judges in Sweden are well known for their high opinion of personal freedoms. If the Pirate Bay owners are found guilty we think it is unlikely they will face much more than a dismantling of their service and wrapped knuckles.