The cable industry and DVR inventor TiVo have said jointly that cable operators will bring out an adaptor so that TiVo boxes can link to devices which use CableCards with no set top box in sight. The spec for the new adapter was developed by cable operators, CableLabs and TiVo. Since the CableCards are supposed to separate conditional access from set top function, this was always going to happen, and the more TiVo’s that are bought be customers, the less the Cable operators have to supply themselves.
The TechCrunch web site this week suggests that after Google has taken on the mobile world with Android, its next step is to try to do the same thing for TV ‘ create a software/advertising platform for a generalized set top that will be open source so that Google can control web to TV experiences, especially the advertising, while dragging hordes of developers to innovate on the platform. That would take addressable and interactive ads, overlays and pre-roll and post roll ads to the TV set.
Telenet in Belgium has bought all the cable businesses from the four cable networks which make up Interkabel, including Integan, Intermedia, PBE and WVEM, which serve about 800,000 homes in the Flanders region for €170 million ($250 million) plus an annual fee. The deal ends years of legal actions between the two over interactive services.
UK buyout specialist Candover, has sold GET a Norwegian cable operator for €745 million ($1.1 billion) to a syndicate of investors led by Quadrangle Capital Partners and GS Capital Partners. GET services 370,000 homes in Oslo and other cities in Southern Norway with a triple play offering of TV, fixed telephony and broadband. Candover acquired the business from Liberty Global for €445 million ($655 million) in January 2006.
UK research group Screen Digest is saying that from a low base of 8% penetration today, around 20% of European households will have true VoD, generating revenues of around €3 billion ($4.4 billion) by the end of 2011, with the big five European markets (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) taking the lion’s share of on-demand revenues, other countries beginning to catch up include Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands. The report also says that major motion pictures will reap around €700 million a year from 2009 onwards.
Verizon is doing so well with its FiOS IPTV fiber to the home service that it plans to raise prices in the New Year, adding around 12% to the price of its Premier service taking it up to $47.99. Existing customers will either keep their old price, or if they signed up way back when it was really cheap, be brought up to last year’s pricing.
Multimedia Research Group (MRG) says that the number of IPTV service subscribers worldwide will reach 72.6 million in 2011, up from just 13.5 million in 2007. This is an increase on the previous MRG forecast due to optimism over market prospects in China, India and Korea. Europe will stay ahead in subscriber numbers through 2011, but Asia will overtake Europe shortly after that says MRG.
Five Hollywood studios are suing Chinese online service Jeboo.com for offering unlicensed downloads of US movies from 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Sony’s Columbia and Universal, who are seeking damages. CNET said that Jeboo.com created software that a local internet cafe used to run a movie download business, called My online cinema, with around 30,000 titles available.
Toshiba in the UK says it will give away five HD DVDs to anyone who buys a top of the range of laptop with a built-in HD DVD player, with choices including Children of Men, Full Metal Jacket, Chronicles of Riddick, Hulk and The Prestige.
UK P2P start up Rawflow has launched its own managed live streaming service, what it is calling a Content Delivery Network (iCDN), which it says is designed to cope with live streaming peak traffic volumes and overcome network congestion. at a fraction of the cost of traditional unicast networks priced at around €0.15 per GByte ($0.22) and said French National broadcaster TF1 is using the service, which streamed 2 million hours of live content to more than six million viewers in a trial.
Israeli telecommunications equipment supplier ECI Telecom aid this week that Neotel, in South Africa, has selected ECI’s XDM and BroadGate line of products to support its network rollout in the country. South Africa has recently liberalized the telecom sector and Neotel is now building a next generation network as the first South African converged communications operator.
Telecom Italia’s Alice Home IPTV service in Italy now reaches some 80,000 users this quarter, up from the 59,000 stated in its last set of figures. The company plans to reach 700,000 by 2009 and is also maintaining hybrid IPTV operations in both Germany and France.
Telecom Italia in France with its Alice ISP is now offering IPTV channels not only to set top owners, but also to PC owners, in an attempt to up numbers of customers there. Rumors have been circulating that the ISP Alice France is up for sale, despite the fact that it just announced that it was trialing fiber to the home in parts of Paris. Alice broadband customers can now TV on their PC with a new service ‘Alice T’l’vision sur PC’, with 12 French channels, with more channels coming next month.
Norwegian browser player Opera said this week that there were 1 million downloads of its new Opera Mini 4 browser in the first ten days that it went up on its site for free download. The new Java based browser offers quicker scrolling, navigation and page rendering that previous version and the company said that there are now 26 million users which have downloaded this and prior versions and they collectively view one billion Web pages a month.
Apple Computer has agreed to pay Burst.com $10 million to end three years of legal battles between the two over patents that Burst says are essential to the operation of the iPod. Apple recently failed to get a summary dismissal of the patents although it eliminated some by proving prior art and obviousness. Apple gets access to all existing patents from Burst except patents relating to DVR technology.
British Telecom has added 150 new films from Paramount Pictures to its hybrid IPTV service BT Vision, which is really a VoD store attached to a DVB-T tuner. The films are added to the several thousand that BT has for download on pay to view or subscription options.
The Register points out this week that the arrival of Orange’s IPTV service into the UK, promised by year end, is unlikely to make it on time. The service was to come as part of a quadruple play tying up Orange’s mobile voice with the old Wannadoo ISP services now trading under the Orange brand. These services have all been merged in Orange parent France Telecom’s native France, but it has said nothing new about the service in the UK since September, and has only announced Disney so far as a content partner.
US chip maker Maxim says it has a DVB-H tuner chip the MAX2165 covering from 470MHz up to 780MHz of spectrum with an I/Q baseband interface. It comes in a 5 by 5 by 8 millimeter, 28-pin package and says its direct-conversion architecture eliminates the need for an IF-SAW filter, reducing the bill of materials. The device has as tuneable notch filter designed to eliminate signals in the 830 MHz to 950 MHz frequency range, in other words cellular signals. It can work in 7MHz and 8MHz channels.
Israeli VoD supplier BitBand, has been selected to supply video servers to Connexion Technologies, a fiber-optic and will help provide multi-dwelling residences and communities with advanced entertainment packages in the US.
Warner Brothers has recently signed deals with the UK’s Virgin Media and BT Vision for its VoD content, and now says this is part of a new initiative to roll out a branded VoD service worldwide. Warner TV also launched on GyaO in September which is available on the open Internet, but geo-filtered for Japan, with revenues based on unskippable advertising. Another deal has been revealed with Orange in France for its IPTV service due anytime now.
US DRM specialist Widevine Technologies has taken the patents that it quite recently announced were awarded in the US, and says they are now also awarded in Korea. The patents seem to include the use of selective encryption; binding key pairs to a specific device; using a user identity to gain access to the key chain; PKI with they key tied to the player apparatus and tamper detection and response agents. It looks to us like it is trying to establish a strong patent holding across the board, and then go after licensing revenues from rivals.
Sony said this week that the overall PlayStation unit sales went up by 178% on what is known in the US as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when retail sales traditionally go through the roof. The PlayStation 3 hardware sales went up by 245% compared to Black Friday sales last year and the company said that since November 2nd PS3 hardware sales have increased by 298%.
Sony also said that its Blu-ray format dominated European movie disks sold this year claiming a 73% share of all such disks year to date, with over 1 million movies sold. In total, including Blu-ray gaming disks sales in Europe have been 21 million units.
Development of mobile TV using DVB-H has been halted in Spain until government elections in March 2008. The government said it needed time to put in a legal framework for the service and that would not happen within the lifetime of this administration. This means DVB-H in Spain will be unlikely to launch during 2008.
Disney finished its financial year with revenues of over $35 billion, operating profits of $7.8 billion, with over half of that coming purely from cable networks, net income of $4.69 billion and net borrowings around the same at last year at $11.5 billion. The numbers are way beyond anything that happened under the watch of previous CEO Michael Eisner who held control for 20 years, and a tribute to the effectiveness of new CEO Robert Iger.
Rohde & Schwarz said it has supplied transmitters to Malaysia’s U Mobile cellular operator to deliver Mobile LiveTV using the DVB-H protocol. It said a combination of low, medium and high-powered transmitters would give comprehensive coverage of mobile TV across the KlangValley surround Kuala Lumpur.