Microsoft said this week it would allow Bungie Studios which developed the ‘Halo’ franchise, to become an independent company. Microsoft will retain a stake and continue an agreement to develop Halo, which is now owned by Microsoft. Halo 3 has already achieved sales of $300 million since its release on September 25.
A company called Vidyo has landed $12 Million in second round funding to company make HD multipoint video conferencing available over the Internet. The deal was led Rho Ventures, and joined by existing investors Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures. The HD system is based on H.264 SVC (scalable video codec), a variant of the H.264 AVC standard developed by JVC to allow multiple concurrent views, and Vidyo claims to have intellectual property in this space.
Zhone Technologies Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) equipment has been selected by the Saudi Telecom Company as part of its migration from legacy TDM to pure IP packet technology. The current phase of work will add more than 60,000 lines of EFM, which is based on native Ethernet with the robustness of an ATM connection.
Wysiwyg Films has acquired 700 hours of television music entertainment from Branson Jubilee, in association with Cinemedia Entertainment. Wysiwyg provides distribution of video to online video services and supplies Joost, Babelgum, GUBA and others. Branson Jubilee is filmed in and around Branson, Missouri, and is a musical variety series hosted by Jimmy Osmond. Yuk.
US regulator the FCC says that it is ready to conduct further testing on unlicensed mobile wireless which may in the end get authorized for use in the white spaces between digital TV broadcast channels. Earlier tests showed that the signals did interfere with the neighboring channels and the FCC wants to get a move on and look at new proposals. The aim is for the generous gaps between the existing UHF TV channels to be used as unlicensed spectrum in the US, but issues of how to police interference, and the potential to reduce the value of the UHF auction in 2008, means this may not happen.
Deutsche Telekom has selected Ericsson to build out VDSL2 technology in 12 German cities, providing high-speed internet access at up to 50 Mbps, using Ericsson’s Ethernet based EDA 1200. The VDSL2 platform will be managed by Ericsson’s ServiceOn Access, a multi-technology network management system allowing end-to-end management of the high-speed network.
Even Libya plans to build a DVB-H mobile TV system, with Libyana Mobile Phone which has over 4 million subscribers and which is the largest Libyan operator, starting a trial in Tripoli. It has chosen Enensys Technologies to provide the Head End, multiplex distribution and transmitters. Enensys is headquartered in France
UK ISPs have been asked why consumers rarely get advertised broadband connection speeds with regulator Ofcom asking the top 6 UK ISP chief executives to come up with solutions that give customers clear information.
The decision to write to ISP chief executives follows increasing consumer concern about broadband speeds, Ofcom said.
By the middle of this year there were already 200 mobile broadband networks globally and more than 50 million subscribers using hundreds of different devices says UK researcher Informa, and it goes on to say that mobile broadband will dominate the connectivity market within four years, based on HSPA, EV-DO and WiMAX with more than 1 billion broadband subscribers by 2011, with the majority using mobile, rather than fixed, systems.
Israeli encoder designer Optibase said this week that Airtel Broadband & Telephone Services, India’s largest private broadband and telephone service, will use an Optibase H.264 Media Gateway 5100 IPTV encoder for its planned IPTV service offerings due out in the fourth the quarter. Bharti Airtel is currently in IPTV trials at a thousand households and is planning to launch its IPTV services across 94 Cities later in the year based on a UTStarcom delivered system.
Broadcom said this week that its VDSL2 and StrataXGS Ethernet products have been qualified and selected by Chunghwa Telecom of Taiwan for mass deployment in its next generation IP services network. Broadcom’s VDSL2 chipsets were originally selected by ZyXEL to put in its next generation access products and the two have teamed up to provide VDSL2 IP DSLAM and customer premises equipment products to Chunghwa for its next generation access network. Separately Broadcom this week also announced a power management system-on-a-chip (SoC) which is now shipping in volume to Samsung Electronics to put in mobile handsets.