Cable & Wireless (C&W), which bought UK unbundled ISP supplier Bulldog three years ago, has made a four-year agreement with Virgin Media to become its exclusive unbundled local loop (LLU) network provider on a wholesale basis until 2011. This appears to contradict earlier plans released by both NTL and Telewest, which form the backbone of Virgin Media TV operations. Both were planning their own unbundled lines by installing DSLAMs at local exchanges, but perhaps they have now pooled these with C&W efforts. The C&W deal brings 4 million homes within reach of Virgin Media services which were previously not in reach. Virgin offers a quadruple play that includes cable TV, broadband and VoIP services, with its own Virgin Mobile MVNO mobile offering.
US private equity group the Carlyle Group, is rumored to be in the process of selling off New York-based cable operator Insight Communications, only two years after acquiring the company by backing a management buyout to the tune of $2.1 billion. Now buyer has yet been named and the Deal web site broke the story.
Broadband TV News says that Nordic pay-TV platform Canal Digital will switch off its standard definition channels, in favor of the high definition format next year. It has already stopped adding new SD channels.
Dutch cable operator Zesko, a mash up of other operators, Casema, Essent Kabelcom and Multikabel, has bought a high definition DVR set top from Cisco’s Scientific Atlanta in order to launch VoD services in The Netherlands. Thee system uses H.264 encoding, and is a first Dutch win for Scientific Atlanta in cable.
EchoStar this week announced a deal with MGM, the Sony controlled US film studios, which allows its Video ON Demand platform Dish On Demand, to carry its content, including films like Casino Royale, Rocky Balboa and Flyboys. MGM is said to have the biggest collection of major film titles, around 4,000 in total. MGM private equity groups Sony and Comcast.
US researcher In-Stat says that the pay TV wars are hotting up across Asia and that IPTV is poised to gain a significant market share there over the next few years claiming that already there are 2.7 million IPTV subscribers in Asia, and this will grow to over 33 million by 2012, bringing in total revenues of $8 billon. The most mature markets there are Japan and Hong Kong, which currently contribute about 60% of the current subscribes and these markets are expected to retain their lead for some time.
Tiscali is now being considered as a favorite to buy Pipex, after front runners BT and the Carphone Warehouse are believed to have been put off by its hosting business, which would need to be offloaded before either of those would be interested. Tiscali has already bought the IPTV HomeChoice service to add to its UK broadband and dialup business in the UK, and it may now add 570,000 Pipex broadband customers.
German cable operator Unitymedia, which now owns ish, iesy and Tele Columbus West will offer a triple play service for just €30 a month, offering 6 Mbps broadband, free telephony to the German fixed network and a basic bouquet of 73 digital TV channels. The three combined cable operators pass 8.5 million homes and has five million basic cable subscribers with under 10% currently digital.
TiVo will offer an on-screen search tool for searching both what’s on the DVR disk drive and what’s on various internet portals. The search system is called Universal Swivel Search and allows search by title, actors and subject matter.
Qualcomm has set aside €100 million to invest in European companies offering innovative technologies which offer 3G applications and its first direct investment will be in French mobile software company Streamezzo which produces software to enable rich media applications on mobile phones.
UK P2P streaming specialist Rawflow is running a technology trial with Italy’s RAI, one of the biggest broadcaster in Italy, to use to distribute cycling programming over the internet to give live coverage of one of the main Italian cycle races.
RealNetworks has signed up what appears to be a significant partnership with Vodafone to deliver music services for most of Europe. RealNetworks will host an internet radio style streaming music services which offers the ability to purchase full-track music downloads. The service will be available in France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and the UK.
Broadcom said this week it has completed the acquisition of Octalica, a privately-held fabless semiconductor company which specializes in designing MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) chips for carrying IPTV content around a home on co-ax. It had told the world it planned to buy Octalia earlier in the month. Broadcom’s video decoders come with existing onboard support for both MoCA and 802.11n Wi-Fi for developing multi-room DVRs.