Radiohead may have invented a new principle when the UK supergroup decided to allow fans to download their latest album for ‘whatever they thought it was worth’ from their own web site, but that hasn’t stopped around half a million copies of the same album being downloaded illegally from BitTorrent since its release says P2P monitoring service Big Champagne. The company said that pirates don’t even know where Raidohead’s site is and are just doing what they are most familiar with.
Swedish cellular base station marker leader Ericsson announced a surprise profits warning this week, saying that third quarter revenues would be closer to $6.7 billion and that net profits would fall by around 38% from those announced last quarter. The company also said that fourth quarter sales will now be closer to $8.2 billion rather than the $9.3 billion it had forecast. The final numbers will be out today. The shortfall is due to the sales mix including more lower margin products and has been chasing market share against Nokia Siemens Networks and Alcatel Lucent, and now promises to focus on profitability.
This week Apple said it would reduce prices of DRM-free tracks to 99 cents, the same or nearly the same as other online services that are selling Universal Music’s DRM-free tracks. Apple has not been allowed access to UMGs DRM free stuff so far. Amazon sells DRM-free music for 89 cents to 99 cents and Wal-Mart is selling for 94 cents, which is funny because most of this stuff ends up on an iPod or iPhone.
Italian patents management firm SISVEL has been given the task of trying to get agreement for the patent pool for DVB-H, the technology in the mobile TV technology that has been broadly endorsed by the European Commission. A SISVEL statement said that although the various companies ailed to agree in a previous attempt (run by MPEG LA), SISVEL is confident of success this time. We’ll see.
Gemstar-TV Guide International said that it has signed three new deals in Germany recently with leading consumer electronic (CE) companies Loewe Opta, Metz-Werke and KATHREIN-Werke,which all allow for the use of Gemstar-TV Guide’s IPR to be used in TVs, recorders and set-top boxes
AT&T’s US cellular arm has cut a deal with Napster to allow customers to search the Napster online music database, and buy songs over the airways. The service will start in mid-November and AT&T claims it will take less than a minute to search and buy a song. Customers can download five tracks a month for $7.49 or buy songs a la carte for just $1.99. The user gets a copy of the song for their PC as well. AT&T also announced two new music applications MobiVJ, a streaming video service, and VIP Access, a mobile fan club and discovery service. Funny we thought AT&T was the company that had the iPhone ‘ oh yeah that only works on GSM.
AT&T’s U-Verse IPTV service saw its first major outage this week on Sunday when most customers lost a number of channels for most of the day. The company says it is conducting a full review, and if it has decent network management (not a given because it wouldn’t have happened if it did) it should be able to stop it happening again.
Irish DRM company Latens said that Consolidated Telcom, of North Dakota has chosen the Latens Foundation CA solution (FCAS) to secure its IPTV services. It comes pre-integrated with Minerva’s iTV Manager middleware and ADB set-top boxes.
MobiTV said this week that Sprint will continue to work with it to extend the successful Sprint TV, Sprint TV Xtra, and Sprint TV en Vivo services to customers throughout the US. There were few extra details, including a new, easier interface, some unspecified quality enhancements including full screen viewing and support for more devices, including PDAs, Smartphones and PocketPCs.
Harmonic this week announced at TelcoTV that ComSpan Communications, of Oregon, has deployed its fiber to the premises (FTTP) video overlay and IP transport solutions for its Triple Play Communications Network.
Broadcom’s third quarter was flat, with revenue at $950 million, up 5.2% over last year. Net income was $27.8 million compared with $110.2 million for this time last year. Although that sounds disappointing, the company banged on about it being a record revenue, and promised forth quarter success, especially in the cell phone sector where it has just launched a new SoC for HSDPA.
SES Americom has turned to UK start up Packet Vision to enable the telecommunications carriers using its IP-PRIME IPTV service to generate advertising revenue through the insertion of targeted local ads. The deal is something of a breakthrough at Packet Vision, which launched two years ago at the IBC show in Amsterdam and have virtually been pre-revenue since then. IP-PRIME is the system whereby SES Americom drops IP packeted video streams down from satellite so that local incumbents don’t need their own head end.
AT&T, the largest US phone company, has decided to jump on the bandwagon and sue VoIP company Vonage for patent infringement. Verizon and Sprint have both sued Vonage, and all of the patents seem to relate not to basic VoIP carriage, but to how the system can transfer calls onto their networks. Their approach has been to invent a way of attaching to their networks and then try to stop anyone from using it. Vonage recently settled one case for with Sprint Nextel for $80 million and is in the process of trying to replace two Verizon patents in its systems.
Not sure why this has attracted huge headlines, but Microsoft has bought a small stake in Facebook for $240 million next round of financing, giving the company a $15 billion valuation. The two companies will expand their existing advertising partnership.
European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes has negotiated a ceasefire with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer in their long running anti-trust dispute, so that the case will not go to another round of appeals. This will be seen as a climbdown for Microsoft and a victory for the EC, and was sorted out over dinner personally between the two, said a NY Times story. It means that Microsoft will open up its server architecture more fully to rivals so that it no longer has an unfair advantage using its own operating system.
Thomson said this week it has sold off its Audio and Video activities outside of Europe to Audiovox and will close the rest of it. This takes Thomson out of DVD and MP3 players, under various brands including RCA. Completion of the sale is expected to take place on December 31, 2007. Separately Thomson also announced that GDC, a system provider in digital cinema, will use the Thomson NexGuard, forensic tracking product line, in 1,200 digital cinema servers.