The Joint Photographic Experts Group has officially accepted the Microsoft candidate technology HD Photo as the follow on standard to JPEG and will rename it JPEG XR. It has a larger color palette, more granular colors, and support for in-camera image processing, and better compression and will be done and dusted in about a year, so with us in late 2008.
Consumer protection agencies in the US are calling for a list of consumers that do not want to have their online behavior tracked, similar to the ‘do not call’ register that prevents a good deal of home telephone sales calls. Presumably it would be voluntary for each marketer to consult the list, rather than mandatory, which is a shame, otherwise we might look forward to a ‘Do not spam’ register.
Zvue nee HandHeld Entertainment has finally completed the acquisition of eBaum’s World, which will also change its business model entirely from a producer of low end handheld video devices using retailers for content distribution to a User Generated Content sharing model. Zvue financed the $15 million cash element of the purchase with a $28 million debenture which raised $4 million more than it had previously stated.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has begun a writers strike that will affect all of Hollywood this week. The last similar strike went on for 22 weeks in 1988, costing the industry $500 million then (which would be multiple $ billions now) and the run of TV repeats drove viewers from TV screens. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is refusing to acknowledge online revenues for writers or to raise payments on DVD revenues which were set last time when it was an experimental media.
Nintendo’s Wii game console has outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 once again in its native Japan according web site Enterbrain’s latest figures for October sales, but the gap is slowly being addressed as more games come on stream for the PS3. There were 110,415 Wiis sold, compared to 47,183 PS3s and 18,717 units of Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The Wii was outselling the PS3 six to one when the two devices first came out.
Ruckus Wireless, the intelligent Wi-Fi provider for distributing IPTV around a home has landed a prestigious Deutsche Telekom account at its ISP T-Home, for its IPTV service. T-Home will resell the Ruckus kit to customers for €150. Wi-Fi is notoriously unreliable and loses between 10% and 15% of IP packets, and the Smart Wi-Fi system that Ruckus sells offers packet resends and multiple wireless pathways to avoid interference. However Deutsche has been slow to convert customers to its Microsoft Mediaroom powered IPTV service and is rumored to have only 30,000 subs.
Nokia and STMicroelectronics have finalized the agreement that was widely touted in August for ST to provide HSPDA chips for Nokia handsets. Nokia will now be able to begin calling off chips from ST, whereas before it took most of these from Texas Instruments. The deal has meant the transfer of 185 engineers from Nokia and was the first 3G chipset win of any kind for ST.
Alcatel-Lucent and Vodafone Portugal have engineered a demonstration of Alcatel’s Unlimited Mobile TV system based on DVB-SH technology, for the European Union annual summit of its Heads of State in October. The aim is clearly to get European wide approval of the use of the S-Band frequencies for the service.
The FLOForum, now up to 90 members, backing the standardization of the FLO (Forward Link-Only) technology developed by Qualcomm has completed its Open Conditional Access Key Management System Framework, which means that external DRM suppliers can offer conditional access for FLO networks, which includes the ability to run in ‘Simulcrypt’ supporting multiple DRMs concurrently, usually used to transition from one CA to another. Irdeto, Nagravision and NDS have all contributed to the specification.
Dilithium Networks has announced a new release of its 3G Video Stack for handset and chipset manufacturers, which includes the MONA (Media Oriented Negotiation Acceleration) and WNSRP (Windowed Numbered Simple Retransmission Protocols) which help accelerate video sends over mobile networks. Dilithium was one of the key developers of MONA, which is needed to offer video ringtones.
Verizon is now saying that in order to compete with the DTH suppliers in the US, which have been fastest off the mark to offer HD programming, it will add 150 HD channels to its FiOS IPTV service by the end of 2008, including a major expansion of sports and multicultural programming, says a report in Multichannel News.
Verizon’s FiOS TV service added 202,000 net new customers to take it to 717,000 at the end of September and it is now the third largest IPTV service in the world (its VOD is IPTV, the rest is more QAM over fiber based). The leaders are France Telecom and PCCW in Hong Kong, which both have over 800,000 customers. One or two more quarters like that should see it take the lead.
Video search engine blinkx is expected to create its own broadband video service to compete with Joost and Babelgum. It is already the world’s biggest video search engine, with 4.2 million a day and 18 million hours of online broadcast content indexed. The difference, we presume is that the video will be played from its own site, whereas its search engine re-routes traffic to the original sites.
Broadcom announced that its new Blu-ray/HD DVD system-on-a-chip has been selected by Korean consumer electronics giant LG Electronics to put in its next dual-format Super Blu BH200 high definition player. LG was a customer for the previous multi-chip Broadcom system, so the step was a natural one. The LG Super Blu player, model BH200, is its second generation dual-format, player, and sells for $999 about $200 cheaper than the first player.