French set top maker Netgem at IBC announced that its NetgemTV middleware will now support new adaptive TV technologies including
Microsoft’s IIS Smooth Streaming/Silverlight and Play Ready DRM plug-in to support OTT video services.
US researcher Strategy Analytics has come out with a report that 13% of Americans are likely to ‘Cord Cut’ from Pay Television in the next year. If it’s right, no wonder it’s pay TV providers that want to provide all the OTT TV. The numbers came from interviewing 2,000 US households. Back in October Trender Research said that some 7% of US homes would dump pay TV for some form of OTT hybrid by 2012. It seems that closer we get to this phenomena, the higher the number goes. Back in August the New York Times ran a piece saying that there is no evidence that cutting the cord will happen at all, which led Faultline to write up a refutation of everything in the article.
Another thing that Faultline has been banging on about, ever since seeing those DirecTV quarterly numbers (415,000 new customers in Latin America versus 100,000 in the US) is the rise and rise of pay TV in Latin America. Parks Associates has now caught up and said much the same thing, that TV services in Latin America will grow by double digits over the next five years outpacing service growth in Asia and other emerging markets. It reckons that 10% annual compound growth rate could be achieved through 2014, compared to less than 2% in Western Europe and North America.
Verizon and Home Box Office this week said that Verizon’s FiOS TV customers will be the first to get access to MAXGO.com, Cinemax’s online video destination with 700 hours of Cinemax programming. Similar to HBO GO, which launched with FiOS in February of this year, MAX GO offers free, unlimited online access to Cinemax programming at any time, from any US location with a broadband connection. It’s has a Netflix-like online watchlist bookmarked for later viewing.
US DVR marker and service supplier TiVo has joined MoCA, the home networking alliance, as an Associate level member. MoCA is widely installed for multiroom DVR in cable, satellite and IPTV which goes well with TiVo, which has offered multi-room DVR functionality for years. TiVo’s Premiere has already been seen in the wild with MoCA compliant connections and the logo has been glimpsed on some new devices since August.
Israeli encoder maker Optibase has cut a deal through its TV gateway subsidiary Vbox, with Syabas, a local provider of home media entertainment. The gateway is a HDTV receiver which builds streams for live broadcast video, audio, and data. It also acts as a router converting incoming DVB data to outgoing IP. Syabas offers the Popcorn Hour line of Networked Media Tanks and the PopBox, and will now offer a new Vbox designed device which will allow the reception of home entertainment media and live TV from a single device.
US VoD supplier Concurrent said this week that ZON TVCabo will use its video delivery platform to expand service offerings to its more than 1.6 million customers in Portugal. Concurrent will provide ZON with a unified video delivery and media data collection and management system.
The South African telecoms regulator, ICASA has seen the error of its ways and has awarded what is said to be a second license for DVB-H mobile TV broadcasting to MultiChoice. Multichoice will now sit alongside rival e.tv, which was awarded the first licensee but which was unable to build a service in time for the world cup. The two will actually share a DVB-H multiplex and Multichoice has virtually all the tower and broadcast assets in place to launch services. The combined team now have 12 months to launch. South Africa is said to now be thinking that perhaps it should join Brazil and most of South America and adopt Japan’s ISDB-T instead of continuing with DVB-T. Which of course would be madness after the launch of a mobile TV service mandated to use DVB-H.
TiVo and Samsung this week said they would collaborate on an advanced DVR system so that future Samsung’s would support TiVo. The system will be built for all DVB Project technologies. Samsung has licensed TiVo’s Hardware Porting Kit and will work with TiVo to build a TiVo verified platform which will accelerate deployment for operators licensing TiVo. Samsung and TiVo plan to bring this new DVR set top offering to market in 2011.
US conditional access specialist Verimatrix said this week it has worked with the International Datacasting Corporation to deliver a satellite TV service to the Wananchi Group in Africa. Verimatrix supplied its VCAS system to secure the satellite TV services in Kenya. VCAS was integrated with the DTH system from IDC.