The UK’s Channel 5 TV channel has been sold by Germany’s RTL to Northern & Shell, a UK publishing company, known for publishing adult magazines, for £103.5 million. The UK advertising market has been recovering and Five in particular has been progressing well, the company said. The new owner said that it would pay the £20 million cost of channel Five’s participation in the web TV platform Project Canvas, which it had previously withdrawn from.
US researcher In-Stat says that Wireless HD chip vendors are in for robust triple-digit growth of Wireless HD enabled products through 2014, rising from the current levels of less than 1 million devices to around 13 million. Wireless HD uses 60 GHz line of sight radio signals within a room to connect HD devices such as Blu-ray players to TV sets.
Apple introduce a new Magic Trackpad for $69 as an add on to a new series of Mac Desktops. It is a touch sensitive pad which sits beside your keyboard to add some form of gesture touch control to conventional desktops.
Apple has also launched a new 27-inch LED Cinema Display to work with Macs, which has a 2560 x 1440 resolution and adds 60% more screen real estate compared to Apple’s previous top end 24-inch Display. Can a TV be far away, we wonder? The new screen is $999.
A new report from the University of Ballarat in Australia reckons that not even 1% of BitTorrent files swapped over the internet are legal. Researchers took torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine if it was copyrighted. They found that 89% of the files were definitely illegally shared, and the remaining 11% was ambiguous and likely to be infringing. The total sample size was only 1,000 torrent files taken at random and only three cases, some 0.3%, were determined to be definitely not infringing.
Apple’s iPhone 4 will be pushed this week to another 17 countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. iPhone 4 will sell from Apple’s retail and online stores and Apple Authorized Resellers only. The iPhone 4 is already available in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US.
We missed this item before our holiday break but thought it was worth mentioning that TiVo has landed another cable operator deal in the US at Suddenlink Communications, which says it is the eighth largest cableco there. The relationship will see Suddenlink distribute co-branded, TiVo Premiere DVRs as well as non-DVR set-top boxes. The TiVo Premiere claims to unify linear TV, DVR, VoD and Internet delivered video into a single experience and the device will begin deploying during 2011. TiVo has modified the VoD so that it can work with the existing Suddenlink cable delivered service.
US researcher In-Stat says that airlines are making big commitments to provide in-flight broadband and that the investment in such equipment will approach half a billion dollars globally by 2013. In-flight Wi-Fi deployments have moved past the trial stage and are approaching critical mass with 2,000 airplanes to be deployed by the end of 2010.
US mobile TV encoder specialist Envivio has raised $15 million in what it calls a mezzanine investment round, so that it can chase video over IP services. It already has OTT customers, including Sezmi in the US and FetchTV in Australia. Envivio says it is experiencing 100% year on year sales growth right now. Envivio has added Erik Miller, as CFO which raises the prospect of the company going public quite soon. Miller has listed two companies on the NASDAQ.
Virgin Media in the UK says that it is going to start another trial for 50 Mbps broadband over fiber, but this time carrying the fiber over electricity poles. The trial is in the Welsh village of Crumlin, Caerphilly, and follows a deal with Surf Telecoms, a Western Power Distribution company, which owns the fiber. Virgin says that it will also provide TV services over this fiber, which sounds like the new TV services it promised using TiVo boxes over broadband using OTT video.
The Digital TV Group says that it won’t be possible after all to converge its UK Connected TV specifications and the European spec, called HbbTV, in time for the launch of Project Canvas. It looks like Canvas has moved somewhat to fit in with UK Connected TV, but this won’t use the same underlying technology as HbbTV. To us this is a clear case of Not Invented Here, and although the Digital TV Group says it will keep trying to harmonize with international standards bodies, this will clearly mean that Canvas and HbbTV set tops can’t be made on the same, unchanged production lines, and just have different software, a fact that will drive up prices for the poor UK consumer. This was confirmed by DTG director-general Richard Lindsay-Davies to Broadband TV News. But he did say that the group was listening to outsiders from Canvas including Virgin Media, Lovefilm and Sky, so Canvas may well include services they can also use.