Belgacom in Belgium says it has extended its deal with Nokia Siemens Networks to continue delivering and building out its IPTV service for another three years. NSN will add HDTV set-tops and content from November in H.264 compression.
The French Consultative Commission for Telecommunications has called on the Government to allocate some of the digital dividend from switching TV digital for internet access in rural communities using broadband wireless, saying that otherwise the cities would have 100 Mbps and the country a mere 512 kbps.
At TelcoTV in Atlanta last week Irish DRM specialist Latens said that the Farmers Telephone Cooperative, headquartered in Kingstree, South Carolina, has selected Latens’ Foundation CA Solution to secure its IPTV services, opting for a pre-integrated system with Minerva middleware and set tops from Motorola and ADB. Latens also said that it had partnered set top supplier ADB to integrate its CA system into its new High Definition DVR.
Israeli IPTV middleware specialist Orca Interactive said this week that Une-Epm Telecomms, which provides Internet, telephony and TV services in Colombia, has selected Orca’s RiGHTv middleware for the first IPTV service rollout in Colombia. Une-Epm will extends a triple play offering throughout the country.
The Trust which decides just what the BBC is allowed to do, has said it can go ahead and carry advertising on its site for users outside the UK. The BBC has a plan to grow online revenues to 10% of its income by making content available with supporting advertising to non UK residents.
FCC chairman Kevin Martin says that he might relax the cross-ownership ban which says that companies owning broadcasters and newspapers can only reach about a third of the US population. We think such a move would not pass muster in a US courtroom or , if asked, at Congress where a prior move was crushed by a colossal vote in favor of keeping cross ownership limits.
Harmonic said it is developing a VoD system for SES Americom’s IP-Prime IPTV service using its StreamLiner 2000 video servers, CLEARcut storage encoding and Ingest Gateway workflow software. IP Prime is a satellite delivered IP ready stream of video channels designed to allow local incumbents to cheaply add IPTV without building their own head end, instead downlinking up to 275 video channels. This now appears to be the VoD equivalent. Presumably the VoD system is to prepare VoD files for ingest into local telco servers, delivered from satellite.
Nokia this week added SEEK, a way of for its MOSH social networking site to make requests for the type of content members are on the lookout for, and the community can then respond with suggestions. This facility is added to content sharing and device customization and will be launched on December 14. It was shown at the recent CTIA Wireless show in San Francisco.
Nintendo shipped 3.9 million last Wii games consoles last quarter taking the total to 13.2 million since launch.
Incumbent Dutch Telco KPN added 77,000 new homes to its various TV services last quarter taking its total to 414,000 which it says are 17% of all digital homes in The Netherlands. However these are not all IPTV, since this figure also includes its digital terrestrial DVB-T Digitenne pay TV service as well.
Widevine Technologies said this week that the US Patent and Trademarking Office has allowed a new patent for the Widevine Cypher Virtual SmartCard which enables separable security of multimedia content from consumer devices. We’re pretty sure that five or six other companies have some claim to have invented a downloadable DRM, not just Widevine, and we shall have to see if the company uses the patent to go after license fees.
Austrian transmitter operator ORS wants all the companies interested in DVB-H in Austria to come and talk at a round table, with the aim being that they can all combine to go after the single Austrian DVB-H license that will be issued in December. ORS would build and manage the network and aims to have it up in time for the European Football Championship Euro 2008. Other bidders are thought to be Mobilkom, Three Austria and One.
EchoStar FSS said this week that not only would it launch the ViP-TV service, an end to end IPTV distribution service in the US, not unlike IP Prime, but that it would also offer both a “push and pull” video on demand service as part of it. A push platform is one where the satellite can drop video onto a DVR for later playing without telling the consumer, and pull is the more traditional VoD service fed over broadband from a remote server. It is based on the same services that EchoStar’s Dish network uses for VoD.
Ericsson’s CFO Karl-Henrik Sundstrom fell on his sword last week due to the unforeseen profit warning that the company issued. CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg (no relation) confirmed that he saw weaker markets, as he announced the replacement was Hans Vestberg ready to succeed Sundstrom straightaway.
While the news last week was all about Microsoft having to fight off Google to partner and part fund social networking phenomena Facebook for $240 million, it now turns out that Facebook has raised a further $500 million from two New York hedge funds. The investments were made with the same valuation of $15 billion assumed in the Microsoft deal said a report in Forbes, but without naming the funds.
Google is understood to be looking for a partner to help it make a bid for US 700 MHz wireless spectrum in next year’s auction. It has said that it ‘might’ invest more than $4 billion to acquire spectrum so that it could run its own services over an extended wireless internet with open access. Our bets would go to Cisco or to Intel, one set on powering the internet the other keen to drive WiMAX broadband wireless, as the likely first two stops for Google.
Tandberg Television, part of Ericsson, said it has provided compression products and managed services to NBC Universal for the launch of its new HD channels, including Bravo HD, USA HD, Sci-Fi HD and CNBC HD. NBC has been a long time customer of Tandberg which will provide its DVB-S2 8PSK modulators to distribute programming to service providers.
UK satellite TV operator BSkyB has signed up one million subscribers to the broadband service it launched last year, just 14 months ago.
IPTV and Cable DRM supplier Verimatrix said this week that P&T Luxembourg has chosen to secure its IPTV with Verimatrix’ Video Content Authority System (VCAS) to use on both live and VoD content.
Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Mel Karmazin said this week that his company’s merger with XM Satellite Radio was on track to complete by the end of 2007. The merger had support from a number of US congressmen this week, but it is still not certain that it will be allowed.
Conditional Access supplier Irdeto’s CEO Graham Kill has taken the extraordinary step of moving his domicile to China, in Beijing. It is true that Irdeto has a lot of Asia Pacific wins, and that he hopes for more and more business from China. He will remain CEO and gradually it is expected that the HQ will split so that it is half and half, Netherlands and Beijing. China has its own encryption standard and this is a hint that Irdeto will shortly embrace that standard and begin offering native systems there.
On2 Technologies the company that wrote the codecs in Adobe Flash Video, has licensed VP6 to RipCode, which has launched the industry’s first hardware accelerated 2-pass encoding and transcoding appliance. The two pass system does half the job of encoding in the first pass, and then works out the any target device variables on the second pass so that it can encode for any screen size and resolution.
Akamai Technologies, which launched at IBC the idea that the distributed edge nature of its network, which file servers close to customers, means that HD video programming can be streamed over the web, this week announced TheHDWeb, a ‘proof-of-concept’ portal. This is designed to show that it really can do HD streaming and the content delivery network has partnered with the likes of Apple, BBC Motion Gallery, CBS, Gannett, MTV Networks and the NBA to show off HD delivery.
Italian IPTV pioneer FastWeb has selected Neptuny’s ContentWise to support the deployment of a pilot project that uses previous viewing behavior and other-user ratings to provide recommendations to its IPTV viewers. FastWeb plans to use content recommendation to help viewers in choose between thousands of programs available on its service, which is based on a proprietary algorithm which supplies weighted recommendations for individual users based on their preferences of actor, director and genre.