Blockbuster said this week that it is expanding the number of Blu-ray disks it has for rental to 1,700 stores by mid-July. It will still offer both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles at its online rental service, and will continue to offer both formats at the initial 250 stores where it tried them out, but it has clearly chosen Blu-ray as a format going forwards, although it says it will closely monitor the situation. Each of the 1,700 stores will carry 170 Blu-ray titles.
Google has launched local versions of YouTube in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the UK and the US. Local sites will use the same database of videos and US rankings of those videos for now but later Google will add country-specific video rankings and comments. YouTube has already cut local content deals with the BBC, France 24, Antena 3 in Spain and others and a number of European football clubs.
The UK Homechoice IPTV system (renamed Tiscali TV) now owned by Italian ISP Tiscali, has launched a VoD service called PictureBox which will give access to feature films from NBC Universal, for a monthly fee of £5 ($10). The system will run 28 films to view at any point in time and then change some of them each week. This is the first we have heard of a single studio system on an IPTV service, and we might expect other IPTV suppliers to be keen to hear how well it goes.
VoD server specialist C-COR has built a pre-integrated version of its VoD server and management tools to work with Harmonic encoders and QAM for the cable market. The offering brings together Harmonic’s compression and edgeQAM technology with C-COR’s demand and advertising management systems. The system will use the C-COR’s nABLE Session and Resource Manager, Harmonic’s NSG 9000 universal edgeQAM and ProoStream 1000 stream processing platform with its Mentor encoding technology.
A report out this week from the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) says there are 1.5 million Blu-ray players in the US, compared with 300,000 HD DVD players. Admittedly most of the Blu-ray players, around 1.4 million of them are Playstation 3 consoles, which only goes to show what a disaster the Blu-ray design would have been without the PS3. About half of the HD DVD boxes are optional add-ons to the Microsoft Xbox 360 console. The report says that the US has spent $35 million on Blu-ray content so far in 2007, compared with $19 million only on HD DVD products, which sounds a little high to us compared to other sources.
US researcher IMS Research, known for keeping databases of installed TV equipment, says that globally HDTV will grow strongly over the next four years, mostly through satellite direct to home systems, and will reach nearly 148 million households by 2011. Some 41% of these will get their TV via satellite, IMS says, largely in the US and Western Europe. We bet cable operators don’t rush out and buy that report.
UK regulator Ofcom reports that just 62,000 homes in the UK now have TV over broadband compared with something like 1 million homes in France. This has risen 44% since last quarter, so around 19,000. All of these subscribers are from Tiscali TV, which is a full multicast service, which is only available in and around London and the number does not count BT Vision, because it is a hybrid with DVB-T.
There are yet more obstacles on the horizon before the BBC can launch its Peer to peer based iPlayer TV service in the UK, where all of its TV programming is to be available free of charge for a few weeks after it has been shown on broadcast TV. The UK’s Open Source Consortium is badgering the European Commission claiming that for a publicly owned service to pushing a system that relies on just one operating system, in this case Windows, amounts to anti-trust, and wants the chance to add a Linux version prior to launch. The BBC has just announced a date for the launch at the end of next month, after 3 years of developing the service.
The European Commission, which belatedly objected to the merger of Sony and Bertelsmann Music Group into Sony BMG, has set a deadline of October 10th for a new investigation into the deal, now that it has been given all the relevant documents it has requested from the two companies. Independent record labels everywhere are still against the deal and hope that somehow the Commission will try to unravel it more than a year after the merger was complete, having been incorrectly approved by the Commission.
Google is understood to be working on a migration tool designed to allows businesses to drop their IMAP email server and replace it with a hosted Gmail system. This tool is targeted at Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes servers and will grab all emails sent to them and put them into a new version of corporate Gmail, if a user sets it up that way.
Denmark is finally getting in on the DVB-H mobile TV standard, one of the last European countries to do so, and Satellite and IPTV specialist Viasat and Danish Telco TDC are launching a test there. Previously the only mobile TV system tried there was by Danmarks Radio, which we understood to be an older DVB-H trial. Both Viasat and TDC have set up DVB-H trials in other countries, namely Sweden and Switzerland. The test will only run for a few weeks and there are no details on whether or not they have spectrum to launch a service.
French ISP Neuf Cegetel will launch a massively multiplayer online racing game called Exalight with the help of F4, a virtual world specialist. It will launch in the fourth quarter and is currently in a closed beta phase. It will feature customized cars and avatars and explore a virtual universe. Cars can just race, or may employ weapons for combat as well. Neuf Cegetel can reach 70% of the French population and plans to have fiber-optic links to around 1 million homes by the end of 2009.
German pay TV service ProSiebenSat1 has acquired SBS Broadcasting in a deal valued at $4.4 billion. In December ProSiebenSat1 was acquired by two private equity companies, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Permira Advisers who already owned SBS Broadcasting and this is really a paper exercise to merge the two assets, which they declared at the time. This creates Germany’s second largest TV company, to challenge the might of RTL, the Bertelsmann subsidiary, Europe’s biggest broadcaster. The new Group will be in 13 European countries, have 24 free to air TV stations, 24 pay TV stations and 22 radio networks, reaching 77 million TV homes, and have revenues of $4.2 billion.
US research company In-Stat says that components for the IEEE 1394 Firewire protocol for high speed serial bus communication will reach its peak during 2008, and then go into a slow decline. The report says that it is second choice in many product areas including the PC market where it is dwarfed by USB, and digital camcorders where it once had more than 85% market share, which has already fallen to 77%.
In-game advertising network Double Fusion has just cut a deal with the US subsidiary of Korean multiplayer gaming company ijji.com, to drop ads into Gunbound, Gunz, Rounders Poker and Soldier Front, free to play internet games. Double Fusion also signed games publisher Gala-Net to serve ads into Upshift StrikeRacer, a new online multiplayer car combat game.