Yahoo said this week that revenues for its fourth quarter were $1,832 million up 8%, that operating profit was just under last year’s fourth quarter and net income was $206 million, down from $269 million last year, and added it would cut 1,000 employees, around 7% of staff as a re-alignment and takea $25 million charge to do so.
Yahoo also renewed and adjusted its deal with AT&T in the US, and will no longer have a guaranteed revenue from each broadband subscriber, but will instead share advertising revenue with AT&T. The new terms call for AT&T to make an up-front payment of between $300 million and $400 million to Yahoo.
US encoder specialist Harmonic said this week that Lifetime Networks will use its Rhozet Carbon Coder video transcoding system to create web video content. The Carbon Coder is deployed in a multi-node ‘farm’ configuration, and enables Lifetime to deliver large amounts of video, adjusting format types and resolutions for different customer devices and end to end data throughput.
Separately Harmonic said this week that C&M in Korea, a cable TV operator with two million subscribers, has deployed Harmonic’s DiviCom Electra 7000 encoder for what is being billed as Asia’s first live HD MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) service in a cable environment.
This week Intellon reported that France IPTV and broadband operation Free has chosen to offer customers its HomePlug AV-compliant powerline system in all its Freebox HD services packages across France. Critics have pointed out that prior versions of HomePlug were not man enough for HD video, but more recent upgrades may have overcome this.
Israeli VoD server specialist BitBand, said this week that it has implemented its Auto-CDN technology at ON Telecoms in Greece. On Telecoms has just installed a metropolitan fiber optic network using 220 km of fiber in the Attica region of Greece. The company offers voice telephony, high speed broadband and television to residential and business customers passing 1.3 million households. BitBand Auto-CDN moves video content dynamically around the network based on usage patterns to minimize likely cross network streaming.
Audemat announced that it has received an R&D contract from Alcatel-Lucent, along with Teamcast, to develop a unit that combines Test and Measurement capabilities and Mobile Metering for the satellite terrestrial DVB-SH mobile TV system.
BSkyB has been ordered by the UK Business and Enterprise Secretary John Hutton to reduce its 17.9% in leading independent TV company ITV to under 7.5%. The satellite operation which is the dominant pay TV operator in the UK, estimates that it will crystallize a loss of £343 million ($682 million ). Sky is said to be considering an appeal.
US DRM specialist Verimatrix says its Video Content Authority System (VCAS) has been selected by Union Electrica in Columbia for the UNE-EPM IPTV deployment in Medellin and Bogota offering 103 TV channels and VoD and DVR function later in the year.
Al Gore’s Current Media, has an IPO planned plans to raise around $100 million. Current Media has an internet only video documentary styled, augmented with user generated video and news aimed at 18-34 year olds and had $63 million in revenues last year with only $9.9 of it from advertising.
Widevine writes the most annoying press releases of any company we know. It always says that it has made it possible for operators to sign high value content, and it always says that it’s the only company that offers content protection with watermarking, which quite simply isn’t true. That said, it has cut a deal with Digital Latin America, whereby it will encrypt and watermark its content which is delivered to 23 countries via satellite, including top US movie content from all the majors.
Another Widevine release says that its cross platform DRM solution will be used by Merlin Interactive, a digital media systems integrator in Latin America, for use with Warner Brothers television content.
Sonic Solutions has stopped supporting HD DVD content and will focus its professional products team on Blu-ray authoring and stop sales of its Scenarist HD DVD authoring product line.
Our financial partners JRPG said this week that US bidding for the critical C block is likely to reach the minimum ($4.638 billion) by today. They reckon this will trigger the ‘real’ bidding in this block, as there will no longer be any motivation for Verizon or AT&T to hide in the weeds (parking bidding units).They also think that so far Google might be the only bidder so far on Block C. We’ll know shortly and there will be no end of analysis once the winners are set in concrete.
Reports in the US major news services are all suggesting that the Sirius XM merger could get approval from regulators as early as this week. If you remember we said the day the deal was announced that it would go through.
Toshiba will be using Broadcom’s recently introduced media PC technology to enable HD DVD playback for three of its recently introduced notebook computers including the Satellite P205, Satellite A205 and Qosmio F45. Broadcom’s new media PC technology are chips which deliver playback of high definition video with low power consumption, and low CPU utilization under Microsoft Windows Vista and XP.
Broadcom said that one of its system on a chip systems has been chosen to go in the RCA DTA800B digital-to-analog converter boxes that are now being offered as a coupon eligible converter box, to interpret digital signals into analog TVs, converting an ATSC high definition television signal into an NTSC signal.