This week’s round up of OTT Video News, Deals, Launches and Products.
Each week Faultline delivers a round up of OTT Video News.
Swedish operator TeliaSonera has added 46,000 TV subscriptions across its European footprint since last year, which includes Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Spain. It also ended 2015 with 1,283,000 broadband subs in these regions, an increase of 15,000 from the same period in the previous year. Its activities in Sweden are reported separately, where it now has 730,000 TV subscriptions, up from 697,000 in Q4 2014. Broadband subs have now hit 1,306,000 in Sweden, an increase of 31,000 from Q4 2015.
Broadcom has announced the results of its recent shareholder selection of consideration they wish to receive in the merger of Broadcom with the newly created Avago vehicle, Broadcom Limited. A majority of 38.6% of the outstanding common shares of Broadcom common stock elected to receive ordinary shares and 30.6% wanted just cash, 8.5% elected to receive restricted exchangeable units of Broadcom Cayman L.P, and 22.3% did not make a valid election, so are deemed to want cash.
US satellite radio broadcaster SiriusXM reported full-year 2015 record revenue of $4.6 billion, and $1.2 billion for last quarter, up 9% and 10% respectively. Net income was $135 million for Q4 2015, and $510 million for the full-year. It also added 2.3 million subscribers, ending 2015 with a total of 29.6 million subscribers.
TalkTalk in the UK lost a total of 101,000 subscribers since it was victim to a cyber-attack in October 2015, which the operator says cost it £15 million ($22 million). RGUs also fell back by 70,000, which TalkTalk says is due to the shutdown of its online sales channels following the attack. However, CEO Dido Harding said it saw positive RGU growth in January. TalkTalk did not publish any TV or broadband subscriber figures.
Rovi and major US patent holder Intellectual Ventures (IV) are teaming up on a patent licensing program, which focuses on OTT offerings. Rovi will license IV’s patent portfolio exclusively to OTT customers, building an offering for the discovery and personalization of digital entertainment. The patents also include content management and delivery, streaming technologies and consumer-facing features and functionality.
Since its announcement at CES last month, Dish Network has now rolled out its third-generation Hopper 3 DVR. It comes with 16 tuners for increased simultaneous recording capacity, and a new feature that allows users to play four live HD channels at the same time, on the same screen, called Sports Bar Mode. The Hopper 3 is powered by the Broadcom 7445, a quad-core Arm processor, and Dish claims it’s seven times faster than the Hopper 2. It will soon launch the Netflix app and integrate Netflix content into search.
Global tablet shipments fell 8% to 223.3 million units in 2015 and 69.9 million in the final quarter, the worst year-on-year performance for the tablet market since the devices were born, according to Strategy Analytics. The Apple iPad topped the tablet market in Q4 with its 16.1 million units making up 23.1% of the market share. Samsung followed with 9 million, Lenovo with 4 million, Amazon with 3.1 million, and Asus with 2.4 million.
Nokia has announced it will receive positive financial compensation in an arbitrated settlement with Samsung. Nokia and Samsung had previously agreed that this would settle the amount of additional compensation payable to Nokia for the five-year extension of their license agreement covering certain Nokia patents for the period beginning on 1st January 2014.
Intertrust has added Apple’s FairPlay and Google’s Widevine to its ExpressPlay DRM systems. Adding these technologies to its system, in addition to PlayReady and its proprietary Marlin DRM, creates a multi-format DRM cloud service for the distribution of video, audio, and eBook content over the internet.
Dutch operator KPN reported an earnings loss of $636 million in Q4 2015, down 7.6%, below analyst estimates. KPN says it added 69,000 new digital TV subscribers, 80,000 mobile subscribers, and 40,000 broadband customers.
British Telecom has opened for business with a strong Q4 2015 – claiming the best revenue growth in more than 7 years. The UK incumbent was helped by good results in its consumer broadband business, as it begins integrating EE’s assets. BT expects a pretax profit of $1.23 billion, up 3% from the previous year’s annual profit – boosted by its Champions League rights. The buyout of EE will create a combination of about 35 million mobile, broadband and TV customers.
Adoption of WiFi access points (APs) based on the new 802.11ac standard has increased to represent 39% of total APs shipped in 2015, and will continue to accelerate in 2016 to 65%, according to ABI Research. Wave 2 access points are based on a richer set of technologies in the 802.11ac specification, including MU-MIMO, which supports better efficiency for high density wireless environments.
Turkish news agency IHA Broadcast Services has deployed Ateme’s Kyrion encoders and decoders to upgrade and extend its flyaway and digital satellite news gathering (DSNG) fleet. The solution is based on the Ateme fifth-generation Stream compression engine, and its encoders and decoders will provide baseband video quality at minimum bitrates – designed for contribution over satellite and IP networks.
Netflix is set to use HDR technology in all future drama productions. Speaking to Digital Trends, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, said he thought HDR was “more visibly different than 4K”, noting that over the past 15 years, there had been plenty of increments of pixels on the screen, with experience from digital cameras meaning that pixel count eventually stopped being interesting.
Vodafone reported strong customer growth, adding 414,000 broadband customers this year, now totaling 13 million with 12 million in Europe. It also has 9.4 million pay TV customers. Its fully converged service Vodafone One in Spain added 360,000 subscribers, now with 1.1 million in total. It says the integration of Ono is proceeding well.
Apple has been forced to pay $625.6 million by a Texas court to internet security software company VirnetX, in a patent-infringement suit filed by VirnetX regarding communication features on Apple mobile devices. VirnetX alleged in 2010 that Apple’s FaceTime and a feature related to virtual private networks infringed the company’s patents.
A report from Point Topic claims there will be at least 100 million people subscribed to gigabit class broadband services by 2020, which currently only sits at less than 10 million. It says that this surge will be driven by market leaders adopting G.fast, with coverage in some mature countries potentially approaching 50%. Close to 70% of growth is expected to come from the APAC region. While G.fast is currently only capable of these speeds over short distances, it can already secure speeds to meet the vast majority of operator demand and the technology is continually developing.
Charter Communications ended 2015 with 11,000 more video customers than it started the year with, the first time it has achieved this in over 10 years. It added 33,000 basic video subscribers in Q4 2015, compared to Time Warner Cable’s addition of 54,000, and Comcast’s 89,000. Charter also grew high-speed data customers by 129,000 in Q4.