The US Warner Music Group has said it will not counter bid against the private equity groups that have bought EMI, the UK record label. This means the existing deal where private equity firm Terra Firma will pay $4.9 billion for the company should go ahead. So far shareholders acceptances of Terra Firma’s bid have been low, and the company is now urging shareholders to act now that it is clear that Warner Music is not going to make a move
Broadband video has been watched at home by some 81 million Americans says Nielsen this week, some 63% of the total US broadband audience. Nielsen did the study for the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, which found that this was a rise of 11 million or 16% since it last asked the question six months ago. Some 33% said that watching on a PC made them watch more programming on a TV.
Sony Online Entertainment said this week that it is launching a redesigned Station.com web site, the location of its massively multiplayer online games, originally used solely for Everquest, it now hosts 20 free games including
casual games like Bejeweled 2, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and offers free trials to paid games.
There are unconfirmed reports this week that UPC Direct, the direct to home pay TV service that runs over the Astra satellite into Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, is in the middle of trialing a replacement encryption system to its existing CryptoWorks. Irdeto bought CryptoWorks from Philips in February 2006. UPC is said to be trying out some terminals with Nagravision, so it must be distributing at least some channels using simulcrypt. UPC uses OpenTV middleware, which got acquired when Nagravision’s parent, the Kudelski group acquired OpenTV last October.
The folly of governments introducing their own search engines continues as the European Commission agreed this week that the German government can spend some $165 million on a German based project Theseus, which will initially contract with German companies Siemens, SAP Deutsche Thomson and Empolis, a Bertelsmann subsidiary, to kick start research. Later, funding will be spread out to smaller businesses to build on earlier research. Theseus is one of the founding heroes in Greek Mythology who fought the Minotaur and found his way out of the famous labyrinth. Previously the German government wanted to work with France on the Quaero search engine, but then pulled out. Theseus is being aimed at search plus audio translation, video and image search.
The European Commission has intervened in the way Italy is allocating its digital TV rights, which it says favor existing analog broadcasters. It is threatening a fine if Italy does not toe the line and open up digital TV to more than just RAI and Mediaset.
The New York Times reported this week that the Chinese authorities have finally does something about counterfeit software. This follows years of pressure and recent complaints through the World Trade Organization. The FBI released details of the arrest of 25 people, and the seizing of around $500 million of software mostly copies of Microsoft and Symantec programs, which was being made in China and sold world wide. The arrests were described as a milestone.
ISP Scarlet, which we reported last month had been ordered by a Belgian court to block the P2P trading of copyrighted files, has filed an appeal and is suggesting that the judge did not fully understand the Belgian law on ISPs, especially parts of a European directive which says, like US legislation, that ISPs cannot be held responsible for the traffic they serve.
Codec and DRM software provider DivX this week is putting its new UGC video portal Stage6 into a separate private company so that some of its key executives can drive that, separately from the high margin, fast-growing technology licensing business that DivX has become. Stage6 had almost 10 million visitors in June up from 4 million in April and is already one of the top 200 most-visited websites. DivX co-founder Jordan Greenhall will step down as CEO to lead the process of separating Stage6, and Kevin Hell, the company’s President, will move to acting CEO.
TiVo has launched a new high definition DVR, at $300 compared to its previous Series 3 TiVo device which cost $800. It is expected to hit retail during August and customers will need to buy TiVo service and can access recent features such as Amazon Unbox video and universal Swivel search, of video on the drive, or the internet. The device is compatible with digital cable, analog cable and digital antenna (ATSC) TV, although it does not appear to work with DVB-S for DirecTV satellite TV and offers 20 hours of HD or up to 180 hours of standard definition content.
MusicNet, which has just changed its corporate name to MediaNet Digital, is set to put one million DRM-free tracks onto its service for partners to begin marketing during the third quarter. Many of these tracks come from EMI, but also from other independent record labels. MusicNet provides the back end technology and a catalog of 4.5 million audio tracks, to online digital music services.
Broadband TV News tells us this week that shares in German satellite TV company Premiere are rocketing due to rumors that Vivendi is now interested in buying the company, following the resolution whereby Premiere has regained rights to the German Soccer league, through a deal with cable operation UnityMedia, which has just been sanctioned by the German anti-trust authorities.
Ericsson and Texas Instruments have agreed this week to offer a reference platform for 3G handsets which will offer power efficient 3G modems from Ericsson combined with the TI OMAP applications processors. The deal will take in OMAP, custom baseband and HSDPA and will support Open OS operating system devices, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Linux. Eventually the partnership will extend to defining LTE handsets which are pre-integrated and tested, the two say, to dramatically reduce development and verification efforts. Presumably Sony Ericsson will be one of its first customers.
There are now two manufacturers of laptop PCs as well as two designers of wireless hubs which have received product certifications from the Universal Serial Bus Implementers Forum (USB-IF) for wireless USB based on UltraWideBand technology. All devices that have wireless USB should connect at speeds up to 480 Mbps via short range radio. Chips have already been certified from Alereon, Intel, NEC, Realtek and WiQuest and now Dell has released an Inspiron 1720 notebook with the chips in, and we already reported that Lenovo already has one. D-Link and IOGear each have a wireless hub certified.
CNET said this week that Intel is having second thoughts about its Viiv concept and will de-emphasize it as a brand, sinking the marketing efforts into the core brand. This will end Intel’s attempts to recreate the success of its Centrino marketing with the Viiv, which was a set of technologies for watching the PC from ten feet away like a TV, complete with remote control and always on software for fast boot, and equipment designs that made it look nice in the sitting room. Intel says there will still be Viiv technologies, but our take is that this is its death.
Google’s second quarter profit fell short of expectations, reflecting its massive spending levels with the search company posting a 58% increase in revenue to $3.87 billion. Growth had been expected to be closer to 63% for the quarter and 73% for the year. It was mostly attributed to a slowing of revenue growth from partner sites that carry Google advertising.
Executives from UK regulator Ofcom this week leaked the idea that it has plans to re-jig the existing spectrum allocations for DVB-T digital terrestrial channels to make room for four new HD broadcast channels. This is in response to repeated broadcaster requests to ‘gift’ broadcasters spare high definition capacity after the digital switchover and is seen as a ‘workable’ compromise.
A report from Japan’s Mobile Consumer Lab points out that ISDB-T 1 seg mobile TV customers are spending less time, and therefore money, on voice and data now that they have access to mobile TV. The Lab points out that with the potential for a huge upsurge in mobile TV globally, that this is a genuine danger that needs to be taken into account when setting mobile TV business models.