NEC said this week that its German subsidiary has been selected by Swisscom Broadcast to build out a DVB-H broadcasting network. Presumably, since it needs to be working in a few months, this is simply confirmation of what they have been quietly building these last few months. Sinc it needs to be operational in time for the European football championship 2008. Initially Zurich, Bern, Geneva and Basle will go live but so far this involves only 26 transmitters, and NEC is only delivering 19 of them, so some other transmitter manufacturer must have provided some. In a separate release Swisscom’s said that the remainder of the DVB-H infrastructure came from Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks. The rest of Switzerland can watch the European soccer tournament on the Vodafone live! portal using streaming cellular.
Nokia said this week that its Music Store in Sweden has gone live with millions of tracks, independent labels, and local Swedish acts to Nokia devices only at present including the Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N82 and Nokia N81. Tracks cost 10 Swedish Krona and albums 100 an a monthly subscription for PC streaming for 100 Krona.
Orange and Nokia this week announced a strategic partnership, extending an earlier agreement signed in February committing them to a three year partnership, including the addition of ten Nokia handsets to the Orange range and combined efforts on music, games, advertising, maps and location services. Looks like their falling out of Ovi is pretty much over.