In a peculiar overreaching of Government power, a US law professor John Duffy, has noticed that the Bush Administration has been illegally appointing judges to preside over patent disputes and has called into question the decisions of 46 judges as a result, all on patent cases. This Professor’s paper on the legitimacy of the appointments has the potential to undo thousands of patent decisions, many of them technology based, often resolving patent disputes worth billions of dollars. Great, we can go back and overturn all those decisions we didn’t agree with.
Intelsat, and Panasonic Avionics said this week that they will work together on the next generation of in-flight passenger broadband access. Panasonic says it is introducing a two way satellite transmission platform, eXConnect, which will allow airline passengers access to the Internet, while Intelsat will use its existing GlobalConnex Network Broadband service from a fleet of 53 satellites to deliver the service offering VPNs, live TV, online shopping, streaming media, telemedicine with data rates comparable to ground public Wi-Fi hotspots.
Rok Entertainment, a mobile entertainment group, said it has bought internet TV firm Jalipo, for total of just 600,000 of its own ordinary shares. Jalipo says it was one of the first online marketplaces for VoD and live events direct around the world. It will harness the content for cellular streaming TV.
There are a batch of iPhone announcements this week, with Apple tying up
Vodafone to sell the iPhone in ten markets in Australia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey only for use on the Vodafone network. Telecom Italia has also announced that it has for the iPhone in Italy later this year and Rogers Wireless exclusively in the Canadian market. AT&T is rumored to have cancelled all leave for employees during two key weeks in June, when it is supposed that the 3G iPhone will be launched in the US.
Verizon said it will raise prices on some of its FiOS digital TV and IPTV VoD bundles and services this coming quarter but has not yet given out details. This is its third price increase in 18 months, and is a sign of its growing confidence in taking on cable. The CFO gave out the move in a conference call around the company’s results. Verizon put $5 on its 200 channel service only in January taking it to $48. Funny we thought the idea of being allowed to compete with cable, was so prices went down.
The UK has launched its Freesat service this week, a digital TV service that offers 80 channels straight from a satellite, free to air. The service is a joint venture between ITV and the BBC, and people pay for the satellite dish and set top and then don’t have to pay again. The service hopes to offer mostly HD channels. Set top box and dish will cost just £49 ($ 95) for SD and £120 ($234) for HD, plus installation costs of around £80 ($156). Initial channels include BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Al-Jazeera English and digital radio and as many as 200 channels are expected by the end of the year.
US DRM company Verimatrix said this week that IOL Netcom has selected its content security for India’s first IP-based on-demand TV service which it expects to reach more than 250,000 subscribers. IOL will also be offering premium MPEG-4 content to the PC using the Verimatrix ViewRight PC Player. IOL will offer an on-demand movie library and 150 broadcast channels, which will also be protected by the Verimatrix VideoMark, forensic watermarking, which gives each stream its own persistent watermark, even on the PC players.
French TV chip maker DiBcom, said that it has now delivered over 10 million components to different segments of the TV market. DiBcom is perhaps now best known for its DVB-H chip which came to the market around a year ahead of anyone else’s, but it was also well established before that in the DVB-T chip market. It claims to have a 75% market share in four major markets: automotive, notebook PCs, mobile phones and other handhelds such as PMPs and LCD TVs, and says that now its chips are in 13 handset models.
Indian award winning cellco Bharti Airtel has heavily hinted that it is in talks to acquire or merge with South Africa’s MTN cellular operator. While Bharti is far smaller than the south African firm it is growing more rapidly and more profitable as a percentage of revenue, and so has a higher market capitalization on the stock market. While it is rumored that it will acquire 51% of the company, there have been similar rumors before, including those involving Chinese operators, which never came to fruition.
Sun Microsystems this week said it has signed a strategic agreement with On2 Technologies which will allow it to integrate the On2 TrueMotion video codecs into its the Java platform JavaFX, which is now a year old launched at last year’s JavaOne conference, as an integrated multimedia platform, combining OS, browser, user interface all in pure Java to make for cheaper Java on handsets and offered under the GNU general public license.
Alcatel-Lucent and Quantum have an agreement whereby the Quantum non-handset DVB-H devices sold in Italy, will be adapted to work with Alcatel’s hybrid terrestrial and satellite DVB-SH mobile broadcast system.
This week China’s home grown CMMB STiMi mobile TV system went live in Beijing and Shenzhen and will add Shanghai to the list at the end of the month in commercial tests, in plenty of time for the Olympics. Eight free channels, one of them local to the region, including one in English (CCTV-9) will run throughout the test. The first terminals will be out next week, mostly USB notebook dongles, and later PMPs, mobile phones, SD card dongles, and MP3 layers should arrive in time for the Olympics in the summer.
CopperGate Communications, the leading chip company behind the HomePNA video delivery standard says that it has shipped 5 million HomePNA chipsets worldwide making it the leader in IPTV services over coax and phone wires. AT&T in the US uses HomePNA, rather than the MoCa standard used by Verizon, and also used at many cable and satellite homes to connect multi-room set tops. HomePNA claims it delivers 320 Mbps and that there are now 25 certified products supporting HomePNA.