AT&T is now talking about using big box retailers including Circuit City and Wal-Mart to sell its U-verse IPTV service to accelerate installations and meet its goal of 1 million customers year end. Not sure about Circuit City, which is has financial issues of its own, it was mid-takeover and having due diligence conducted when Blockbuster pulled out, but Wal-Mart has many deals of this type. It will begin in a month’s time in an initial 600 stores.
End-to-end service monitoring company Witbe says that it has measured global channel change times for digital TV and says the average in below 1.9 seconds and says that channel change time and image quality are central to TV service suppliers. Witbe carried out a study of digital TV services (via DSL, cable, FTTH, satellite and DTT), looking at 30 operators in 16 countries on 4 continents. Witbe said that satellite is twice as slow as IPTV, that services launched recently are often slower and that Microsoft Mediaroom has the best results with an average of 0.6 seconds though it is not that far ahead of the pack.
US telco Qwest has shuttered its Choice TV service which was an early DSL TV experiment and it will migrate customers to its DirecTV partner. It has about 42,000 customers in Arizona subscribing to Choice TV, and a handful in Colorado. Qwest has 700,000 video customers through its relationship with DirecTV, and gained more than 32,000 of them during the second quarter of this year.
Apple has called upon a Federal Judge to throw out a legal action against it brought by 3G customers saying those customers never asked Apple for help. The suit was initiated by one customer saying their phone repeatedly dropped calls and didn’t match Apple’s claims. Another lawsuit was filed in California against Apple mostly blaming AT&T’s network. Apple also has an anti-trust suit filed against it for tying its phone to the AT&T network.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and Yahoo have approached the Justice Department to talk about how they can continue their scheduled co-operation over selling advertising on the Yahoo network. The deal is being said to hand too much control in internet advertising market to Google and we agree, it does.
Macrovision has completed that deal we talked about last week, selling off its TV Guide magazine to private equity firm OpenGate Capital, but unfortunately it has not said how much it got for it, so we can’t tell you if our estimate of $400 million was close. The sale was always planned after Macrovision merged with Gemstar for its EPG patents and onscreen TV guide.
The US kiosk company Redbox which runs a network of in-store DVD rental kiosks, said this week it was suing the home entertainment division of Universal Studios alleging antitrust laws and misuse of copyrights. Universal wants to change its terms so that rental DVDs cannot be sold after they are finished with, and cut down on the percentage of DVDs any given kiosk can hold from Universal. If true, it does sound kinda illegal.
Bertelsmann has launched BMG Rights Management a new service which can advise songwriters and performers on how to build a repertoire and market and licensing their creations, including working with online and mobile services, radio and TV broadcasts, live concerts and video games. We’re sorry, but just why would you place your trust in a company which helped fund Napster in the first place?
The Universal Powerline Association (UPA) has certified ten new products, both for broadband access and for in-building powerline broadband distribution from six different companies. The certification program supports deployment using 200Mbps powerline technology.
Orange in the UK, Spain and Poland has cut a deal to take the back catalog of Hollywood film studio MGM for showing on its VoD Orange Cinema pay TV service in those countries. Orange Cinema already has deals with Warner Brothers, HBO and local French film producers and will launch its service in mid-November with five channels, costing €12 a month on TVs and PCs and €8 on mobile phones.
Sling Media’s Sling Catcher, which catches video streams from a sling Box TV or from the internet, and sends them remotely across a broadband link, or around the home, has finally been delivered in the US, Canada and the UK. It was launched in January. The SlingCatcher allows customers to watch online video from any popular site on the internet or from a home based Sling Box which can forward content including from pay TV services and DVDs players.
Poland has finally begun the auction process for its long delayed DVB-H spectrum an will be closing applications at the beginning of January. There is a license to run across just 31 cities until May 2015 and then the services must broaden to a national license running to 2023. Two thirds of the multiplex capacity needs to be offered to existing TV and radio services.
Joke of the week goes to the investor that spread the rumor that Microsoft is about to buy Research In Motion (RIM) for $50 or $60 a share, about half of what its share prices was a few months ago. The logic is that Microsoft is going to take a hardware software combination up against Google’s Android. Except that Google’s offering is not hardware, and Microsoft would be competing with all its new found buddies (like Nokia) in handset land, and would have to enter the hardware business (it does it in Xbox and Zune). Such rumors from a US finance analyst can only be designed to lift the share price of RIM, because there is no serious fit, it’s counter intuitive and it would drive down the Microsoft share price. None of which means it isn’t true.