France Telecom’s second quarter shows that it has grown the number of its IPTV customers to 872,000, from 768,000 last quarter, a rise of 104,000 in the quarter. Total revenues for the group were up to €13 billion ($17.9 billion) up just 2.5%. The biggest growth was in cellular which now makes up more than half of its total revenue. ADSL numbers rose to 10.5 million, with 6.5 million of those in France, and 5 million of the total using a Livebox home gateway, which means it offers more than one service over the ADSL line, mostly VoIP. Revenues from traditional telephone services dropped 17%.
The Apple third quarter results showed revenue of $5.4 billion and net income of $818 million, still surging compared to $4.37 billion revenue last time and $472 million net income. Apple shipped 1.76 millions Macs, a number that is continuing to rise, up 33% and way over the industry average, and sold 9.8 million iPods, up 21% against the year-ago quarter. The company reported sales of 270,000 iPhones in the quarter, which amounted to just a couple of days, a contrasts with the AT&T sign ups registered over the same period, at 146,000. Apple now reckons it will sell a million iPhones by the end of the fourth quarter.
Cisco is also on a roll, ending its fourth quarter with sales of $9.4 billion up 18%, and net income of $1.9 billion, up 25%, with a balanced performance across all product lines, services, geographies and customer segments. CEO John Chambers said he expected the company to be driven by collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies going forward. For the year Cisco did sales of $34.9 billion up 22.6% and net income of $7.3 billion up 31.4%. Scientific Atlanta contributed $2.8 billion to net sales and Cisco has $22 billion in cash despite buying back 54 million of its own shares last quarter for $7.8 billion. Last year Cisco bought a chunk of VMware, all of WebEx, IronPort Systems and BroadWare Technologies.
Leading Spanish cable operator ONO made its first ever profit during the first half of 2007 at just €1 million, compared to a €35 million loss last time, on the back of broadband gains, adding 108,000 customers in the half year, taking it to 1.2 million, with 575,000 of them taking the Ono triple play offer.
Transmitter specialist Harris says that has installed it Atlas transmitters using the MediaFLO exciter, in Taiwan, where Qualcomm has a 6 channel trial running up against an established DVB-H trial with China Network Systems and Taiwan Television Enterprise.
The UK’s Virgin Media has delayed what we believe to be a false $23 billion plus auction for its assets. We say false as we don’t expect the company will be sold at all, since all the deals mentioned so far appear to be of low value. The debt markets are unsettled and the delay is ostensibly to give private equity players more time to get their ducks in a row to counter the deal offered by Carlyle. One supposed bid from TPG will now not materialize, which has understood to have said it doesn’t like Virgin’s business model.
There is a second IPTV operation being launched in the Czech Republic, from Volny offering 40 channels including movie channels, and VoD. The system also offers online games, music and photosharing. A system was launched last year by Telefonica O2 Czech Republic, which used to be Cesky Telecom, using the Imagenio software developed in Spain and now being supported by Lucent. The Czech Republic has only 3.1 million phone lines, among 10.2 million people, and less than 500,000 of them have broadband lines.
European ISP Tiscali has turned a corner since it took over the Homechoice IPTV system in the UK, and is now preparing to launch a similar service back in its native Italy, by October this year. The system will rely heavily on TV content from broadcaster RAI, but will include a DVR and on demand access to past programming.
Korea Telecom perversely expects to launch a Russian IPTV service, before it even gets one off the ground in its own country. Korean regulations have stopped it going wholeheartedly into IPTV at home, but it has web TV services. It will launch genuine pay TV services, president Nam Joong-soo told the local press, with a trial in August in one Russian province, and a full launch expected next year.
A new report from The Diffusion Group says that of consumers who rent movies from a traditional video rental store, 15% also use a pay-per-view service, 14% use a direct-mail service, and 12% use a video-on-demand service for their movie rentals. Online movie services, however, continue to have a negligible impact on rental behavior and less than 2% of adult broadband users have rented movies through online services and less than 1% use them frequently.
Buffalo Broadband Solutions Group in Japan, has announced a 200Mbps UPA-compliant Powerline Modem using Spain’s DS2 built chips, which it says can transport flicker free HD streams from room to room which will be offered with Networked Attached Storage to store video, which will hit stores this August in Japan.
Long term 3D software specialist Autodesk says that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire all the assets of Skymatter, the New Zealand developer of the Mudbox 3D modeling software. Autodesk will integrate it into its Maya, 3D Studio and 3ds max product lines and the deal will close in the next two months. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Mudbox offers 3D brush-based modeling, allowing users to sculpt organic shapes in 3D space with brush-like tools.
It appears to all intents and purposes, despite a late uprising by a few of the Bancroft family, that News Corporation will buy Dow Jones with its prize Wall Street Journal, for around $5.6 billion. While many of the Bancroft family shareholders who control voting interest backed the deal a handful, holding just under 10% are still trying to find a way to block it, a move that looks increasingly unlikely. Shareholders will get $60 in cash and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch is expected to use it to launch a daily TV financial channel on Fox.
EMI has now officially fallen to Maltby, a company formed at the direction of private equity group Terra Firma as 732 million shares have now been tendered, representing 90% of the total. Initially few shares were offered, because an alternative offer was expected from Warner Music, which has now made it clear it will not bid.
Californian HandHeld Entertainment, which makes tiny $100 portable video players, said this week it will buy eBaum’s World, a user generated video site for $17.5 million plus extra earn out payments, if achieved. Handheld had problems getting enough content for its devices early on its life, and has been quietly acquiring online video sources. It will fund this deal with $24 of debt. eBaum’s World had $5.2 million in revenue last year and has served 2.5 billion video streams over the last 12 months and claims up to 19 million unique visitors each month.
Qualcomm has licensed the intellectual property around Flash OFDM that it acquired when it bought Flarion, to Exoteq Aps, a mobile broadband developer in Denmark. Qualcomm has granted Exoteq a patent license to develop, manufacture and sell subscriber unit and modem card products for high-speed mobile broadband access based on OFDM/OFDMA technologies. Qualcomm is known to be stake building in IPR around OFDM so that it can gain a chunk of royalty revenues once WiMAX networks become widespread.
BT Group in the UK says that it now has 20,000 customers signed up for its IPTV service BT Vision, which it has really only just started marketing in anger. BT Vision is a hybrid service based on a DVB-T set top and a broadband connection for VoD only services. BT CEO Ben Verwaayen said he expected subscriber levels to pass 100,000 by the end of this year.
Samsung has unveiled a dual-format High Definition DVD player in the US which will play both Blu-ray and HD DVDs, making it the second company to do so after LG Electronics. The player will be made available in the fourth quarter at $1,049.
Nintendo made net income of $667 million for the second quarter of 2007, up by over 500% over the $129 million it achieved last year, based on the astounding success of its Wii console. Total sales have more than doubled to $2.8 billion as it sold 3.43m Wii consoles worldwide in the quarter, bringing total sales to 9.27 million units. It expects to have sold 16.5 million Wii units by March 2008, up from its previous forecast of 14 million.
Microsoft said this week it would acquire AdECN, an advertising exchange platform based in California. This adds the auctioning element that Microsoft has previously lacked with which to take on Google, offering, a real-time auction for buying and selling display advertising. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Sales of IPTV services in the Netherlands rose 47% year on year at incumbent telco KPN ending with 337,000 subscribers, up 41,000 over last quarter. In August KPN will bring in a new triple play strategy starting IPTV at €9.95, available in combination with DSL and VoIP.
AT&T signed up 38,000 new U-verse customers in the second quarter, a run rate of almost 3,000 a week, bring its total to 51,000. Verizon added a further 167,000 subs for FiOS TV, more like 14,000 a week, taking its total to 515,000, ten time more than AT&T.
There have been two bids so far in the Swiss mobile TV spectrum auction, Mobile TV Switzerland and Swisscom Broadcast. Not much is known about the Mobile TV Switzerland business except that it is run by Bruno Bucher, who was until recently the chief content officer for Swisscom Mobile AG. So it’s Swisscom or Swisscom refugees at this point. Mobile TV services have to be up and running under the license, in time for the UEFA EURO 2008 soccer finals, so they better hurry up and decide which one gets it.
ZDNet in Asia said this week that Smart Communications in the Philippines has rolled out commercial mobile TV services based on DVB-H. The system was developed by a consortium led by Nokia and it will be offered on selected Nokia handsets, including the recently-launched N92. Smart has teamed with 360media for the service, which will be called myTV and pushed to the 27 million customers Smart customers.
Vodafone said definitively this week that it has let the deadline come and go by which it could insist that Verizon bought up to $10 billion of Vodafone’s interest in Verizon Wireless. This is the final put option the company has, and it has been under public pressure from investors to take the money and return it to investors in the form of a dividend, but has declined.
Nokia has taken a huge step away from long term chip partner Texas Instruments by announcing this week dual source chip arrangements with four chip suppliers. Texas Instruments continues to be a broad scope supplier across all protocols, Broadcom has been chosen as a supplier in EDGE, Infineon Technologies as a supplier in GSM, and STMicroelectronics as a supplier in 3G. Nokia has long been known to share its own chip research with Texas, and now this arrangement will also extend to the others.
The FLO Forum, as expected, has reacted to the European Commission’s Communication on ‘Strengthening the Internal Market for Mobile TV’, saying that it applauds the Commission’s efforts to advance the high potential mobile TV opportunity in Europe, including the focus on spectrum, harmonization, standardization and regulation but says that favoring one technology could stall a healthy European mobile TV eco-system, adding that ‘Technology mandation is not an appropriate regulatory tool,’ which we understand even if mandation is not a word.