The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) has announced that Cambridge Industries Group (CIG), a Shanghai-based networking equipment manufacturer, has joined its wireline networking standards body as an Associate member. CIG began offering MoCA adapters at CES last month, and the MoCA membership list now stands at 44 companies, with 217 certified products.
Dish Network has launched a truly excellent marketing campaign called “Tuned In To You” in an attempt to combat declining consumer satisfaction levels with pay TV services. Faultline has been suggesting for years that US pay TV operator s should focus on customer care as a core competence. This began with a multi-million dollar advertising campaign which addresses common pay TV frustrations, followed by Dish claiming to have solved these issues. It has also launched “Base Camp,” which throws corporate employees into the field for one month in consumer facing roles. How long before Comcast responds?
US screen materials company PPG has received a $15 million investment from Universal Display Corporation, into its manufacturing facility where Universal Display’s proprietary UniversalPHOLED phosphorescent emitter products are made. These are used for thin, energy-efficient displays in TVs, smartphones and tablets.
The FCC issued a proposal for the voluntary adoption of ATSC 3.0 last week, and the President and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), Gary Shapiro, has since responded. He said in a statement: “While well-intended, this initial version includes troubling language about a TV tuner mandate. We stand by our initial joint filing supporting a voluntary, market-driven transition. We also support the Commission’s tentative agreement that a TV tuner mandate is unnecessary.”
Nielsen’s inclusion of digital measurement in TV ad ratings has seen the company awarded accreditation by the Media Rating Council. The system, launched in 2015, claims to account for linear TV viewing which is taking place on mobile and desktop devices, but has been widely criticized by potential clients and rivals.
The Nasdaq Hearings Panel has delisted the shares of comScore common stock from the Nasdaq Global Select Market and suspended trading. This is because comScore has been slow to restate its accounts after it changed how it accounts for some non-monetary transactions from 2013 to 2015, which added about $30 million to the company’s 2015 sales. Once it files restated results to Nasdaq’s satisfaction it should start trading again.
US TV manufacturer Vizio has reached an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to pay tout $2.2 million, after it was caught monitoring and collecting viewer data from its TV sets, also called automatic content recognition (ACR) technology. A statement from Vizio General Counsel Jerry Huang said: “The FTC has made clear that all smart TV makers should get people’s consent before collecting and sharing television viewing information and Vizio now is leading the way. The practices challenged by the government related only to the use of viewing data in ‘aggregate,’ to create summary reports measuring viewing audiences or behaviors.”
5G technology will let cellular operators compete with broadcasters in cable, satellite, IPTV and free to air broadcast TV markets, says researcher Strategy Analytics. The report notes that 5G TV services could cause major disruption in the 2020s, caused by developments in MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) and beamforming for optimal spectrum use, virtualization of cell sites, dynamic throughput over backhaul networks and network slicing to guarantee data rates to the household.
Irdeto has partnered with video platform Samba Tech to secure content delivery for Latin American SVoD service Univer Video. The Irdeto Rights system gives Univer Video multi-DRM support for PlayReady, Widevine and FairPlay.
A crackdown on illegal set tops in the UK has resulted in five arrests in the North West of England and Wales, thanks to a joint operation between The Federation Against Copyright Theft, the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit, Greater Manchester Police and the Intellectual Property Office. The devices seized contained unlicensed added extras and apps to unlawfully stream content for premium pay TV channels, live sports and movies.
New York-based entertainment network Epix, part of Paramount Pictures, has launched a TV Everywhere app for the 4th generation Apple TV, offering a four-month free trial to new subscribers.
Nokia has struck a distribution deal for its G.fast technology with Energia Communications (EneCom) in Japan – Nokia’s first reseller for the broadband access technology in the country. EneCom aims to expand its business with utility service providers by offering an alternative for traditional VDSL2.
Entertainment and ticketing giant Live Nation has selected Amazon Web Services to migrate its IT infrastructure over to the AWS public cloud infrastructure. AWS will scale the growth in Live Nation’s Ticketmaster arm, claiming 530 million transactions annually, using AWS Lambda, Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), Amazon Aurora, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
AWS encoding subsidiary Elemental has won a contract to power the video headend built by Panama-based pay TV operator Cable Onda. It will use Elemental Live with Statistical Multiplexing capabilities, as well as Elemental Server encoding and Elemental Conductor for systems management. Elemental notes that Cable Onda has the option to add 4K services later.