The latest in this weeks round up of OTT Video deals, launches and products.
If Arris is a barometer to the health of the pay TV technology industry then its revenues being down $13% at $1.1 billion or Q4, and net income down 84% to $30 million is poor news. We are beginning to witness the kind of pressure which forced it into the merger with Pace. Once Arris has absorbed Pace it says its first quarter will be $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion. The company ended the year with more cash at $879 million, but generated less (just $351.9 million) from operating activities this year. Its book to bill ratio was a healthy 1.14, and its order backlog is $715.8 million. It says this performance is in line with expectations, except it is ahead on CCAP orders.
US ticketing firm Fandango, said it has acquired Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, which includes the movie critic rating tool, the Tomatometer, from Warner Brothers Entertainment. Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, plus the on-demand video service, M-GO, will be focused on expanding the company’s theatrical ticketing business. Fandango is owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal.
Kudelski Group results just out show revenue up 11.1% to the equivalent of $955 million and net income up 48% to $49 million, and the group generated $107 million in cash, from operating activities. It says it should break the $1 billion market this year. It had good growth at Skidata which is the automation of turnstiles and ticketing, and within its Nagra TV conditional access and DRM, with deals at Liberty Global, Altice and its long term partner Dish. It has also been really active this year in patent licensing and legal actions and this has led to new agreements and taking it in to the US. Notable middleware wins included Net Servicos in Brazil, TBC in Taiwan and its MeidaLive OTT system has wins at Telefonica, Altice and KBRO in Taiwan and it has a handful of new deals for its Conax subsidiary in the Far East and Latam.
French satellite group Eutelsat says it now carries 6,000 TV channels broadcast from its satellite fleet, especially in emerging markets including the Middle East and Africa. Over the last 12 months, six new platforms have launched or expanded their activities on Eutelsat’s African satellites, many of them free to air. Eutelsat says it has been validating UHD and is now transmitting its first commercial Ultra HD channels in Russia and Europe.
For its half year figures Eutelsat had revenues of €774 million, up 1.5% and net income of €188 million, up 17.0%.
Samsung Electronics says it is the first chip maker to move to 14nm process technology and has announced its Exynos 7 Octa 7870 processor, designed for mid-range smartphones. It says the chip offers more performance while using 30% less power. The 7870 has 8 Cortex-A53 cores and an LTE Cat.6 2CA modem, which supports 300Mbps downlink speed and FDD-TDD joint carrier aggregation. It supports 1080p 60fps video playback and WUXGA (1920×1200) display resolution and will be in mass production in Q1.
Sony Electronics has announced a new lineup of 4K UHD TVs supporting Android TV, along with home automation controls and voice search features – the XBR line with 3 models powered by Sony’s 4K Processor X1 image engine, and offering dramatic contrasts. The Slim Backlight Drive a grid array offering local dimming and boosted backlighting is built into the XBR out X930D, offering X-tended Dynamic Range PRO (HDR), and its Triluminos Display which delivers a wider color gamut. The new models will support a new Sony App called Ultra, which lets consumers purchase and stream 4K HDR movies. The new models start at $2,500 for the 55 inch versions and go up to $10,000 for the 85 inch.
Akamai said this week that it has introduced a web security technology which allows website owners to manage robots or Bots which visit its site. Up to 60% of a site’s traffic can be generated by bots – programs that operate as agents to simulate human activity. Akamai Bot manager offers a comprehensive strategy when dealing with bots, helping users better identify and understand what types of bot traffic are hitting their sites, and providing remediation and not just simple blocking.
Nokia (the Alcatel part) says it has a G.fast implementation in progress in Japan with Energia Communications (EneCom) for residential broadband. EneCom is a roughly $340 million business and expects the G.fast technology to offer speeds up to 1Gbps in the Chugoku region of Japan, which has some 7.5 million inhabitants, starting in June, with a high percentage in MDUs.
ARM has come out with a new Cortex-R8 processor which it says can cope with 5G speeds. There is not a press release that comes out today in cellular that does not say 5G on it. ARM says it is twice the speed of its previous generation of chips and already people are announcing this design in chips for Q1 delivery, so nothing to do with 5G.
US content distributor Cinedigm says that Nasdaq says it can remain listed now it has plans to comply with the $1 minimum listing price. It will do a reverse stock split if necessary, it says. Cinedigm has distribution deals with storefronts and digital platforms, including Wal-Mart, Target, iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon.
Colorado based set top firm Evolution Digital and the National Cable Television Cooperative have announced a deal to let NCTC members use the Evolution Digital’s IP Hybrid set top which it built with TiVo 6 months ago. It will now work with the NCTC’s Bravo platform.
Apple has a fine moral dilemma on its hands, helping the FBI on the back of a court order, to break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, and do it in such a way that the systems could be used to crack any iPhone, or defy and appeal the order. So far CEO Tim Cook is fighting the order. ON the one hand most view these killers as terrorists, and on the other, once a solution to break Apple is out there, all knowledge becomes public. We hope Cook stays strong on this one.
China’s Huawei says it has manufactured its 100 millionth FTTH terminal since it launched into the industry in 2007.
How does this work? Qualcomm and SpiderCloud have developed small cells for enterprises which also use unlicensed spectrum. Imagine – you install some of these and all your WiFi either stops working or it drops in capacity. You just paid a ton of money for a technology which uses far more expensive chips and your communications fall apart. Even if LTE-U and LAA can be made to avoid WiFi, they will still, when using the same spectrum, slow each other down. These SpiderCloud systems should be among the first to deliver LTE capacity over unlicensed spectrum in large indoor environments, such as offices, university campuses, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers and sport venues.
comScore grew Q4 revenues 8% to $97.7 million, and net income was $4.4 million, and free cash flow was $10.7 million, up 68% from the same quarter last year. Annual revenues were up 13% to $368.4 million. The effects of the merger with Rentrak will no doubt be in the next quarter’s numbers, not these.
Just when we thought we’d heard the last of intrepid Vidmind, it has re-emerged with a plum contract at Kyivstar in the Ukraine, offering a nationwide pay OTT service, which it will show off at Mobile World Congress later this month. It originally announced this last June. We first came across Israel-based Vidmind in September 2012 offering a full cloud platform for OTT. It used a cloud encoder from Media Excel, a low cost ARM based Android set top, and APIs into third party components such as CRM, transcoding and billing. Vidmind put this Kyivstar system together with ViaSat of the Modern Times Group, for a full service, including content and DTH delivery, plus OTT. Kyivstar has 800,000 subscribers and also serves 26 million mobile phone users.
It is sad to see the name Sir Clive Sinclair still being associated with the 30-year old Spectrum computer, but it is. His namesake has been used to raise £100,000 using crowdfunding, to build the Vega+ which comes complete with 1,000 licensed games built-in. The cash was raised in 3 days. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ looks like an old spectrum, but most of the work is now done by one chip. There was a time when people wondered where all the ZX Spectrum computers had gone, because no-one knew anyone who admitted having one, but they sold in the millions. The Vega+ is made under license from Sky In-Home Service, which inherited the intellectual property rights from Amstrad which bought the remnants of the Sinclair business. It is unclear of Sir Clive has any continuing relationship to the deal.
DRM inventor Intertrust Technologies said this week it has added session-based video watermarking capabilities from Civolution’s NexGuard to its ExpressPlay DRM system. ExpressPlay using Marlin DRM is currently a leading DRM in China.
Xiaomi the Chinese phone maker is said to be on the verge of releasing a consumer drone, according to leaks published in Chinese newspapers. Speculation says the price is likely to be around $110. It will be an entry-level aerial photography drone with GPS and altitude holding technologies and an initial production run could be just 10,000 units. Xiaomi is known for its strong phone design and feature set – if the same happens in drones, watch out.