Sony delivered on rumors that said it had a PS3 DVR up its sleeve announcing it this week at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, with a TV tuner, a DVR and the ability to copy the files to the PlayStation Portable for portable viewing. It is called PlayTV, and uses the DVB-T format and will ship first in Spain, Germany, France, Italy and the UK early next year.
Hungary’s National Communications Authority (NHH) says it is ready to offer for tender spectrum for a national terrestrial digital network using both DVB-T for TV sets, and DVB-H for mobile handsets, as well as a DAB radio multiplex, for free-to-air broadcasting, NHH shall publish the final tenders once brief public consultation is complete and expects the whole process to be over by early 2008.
Nokia is off the hook for all those batteries that have to be returned with Japanese battery manufacturer Matsushita Battery promising to cover the direct costs of the Nokia recall on BL-5C batteries thought to be at risk for overheating which were shipped on 46 million of its handsets. The estimate of the cost is $172 million.
Alcatel-Lucent will build a WIMAX network for France’s Bollor’ Telecom, which has 12 WiMax licences in France in 3.5 MHz spectrum, offering the Paris region VoIP and broadband services. Alcatel-Lucent will also manage the acquisition of sites, and CPE equipment procurement.
The largest German cable company Kabel Deutschland Group (KDG) says it has increased digital subscribers by 169,000 to 718,000 in the last year and has 386,000 combined telephony and broadband customers. But its total number of RGUs actually went down to 9,258,000, presumably due to analog TV cancellations, resulting in a small loss.
Insight Research says that worldwide peer-to-peer and file sharing services will generate $28 billion over the next five years with more and more operators offering legitimate file-sharing and downloading services, with revenue from such services in Asia already double US revenues, which are just starting to move into the mainstream.
A US teenager and four international collaborators have inevitably hacked the iPhone, releasing it for use across other networks, not just the AT&T network that has an exclusive on the device. The 17 year old named George Hotz has been using his iPhone on his T-Mobile account, the only other US carrier which offers GSM services. It will have more impact in Europe where every country has a GSM network of some description, and in many countries as many as four. The hack is tricky enough to put most average users off trying it. The only feature that Hotz can’t get to work on other networks is the ‘visual voicemail’ feature, which shows voice messages in lists like e-mail.
An interesting snippet comes this week from US researcher In-Stat which says that the market for MP3 players and portable media will shift from audio devices to video-capable devices. Only 11% of respondents said they would buy a device just for video, but the price of incorporating video is coming down so fast, In-Stat expects video-enabled PMPs to outpace audio only players before the end of 2008. It reckons that worldwide shipments for audio-only MP3 players and PMPs combined will reach 275 million units in 2011, up from 182 million in 2006.
Sonic Solutions said this week that one of its patents for dynamic content revision has been included in those considered essential for the HD DVD specification. Sonic Solutions already knew that it will get a share of the Blu-ray patent pool through the same patent, and now it can expect some royalties for HD DVD players. The patent allows for updating content on portable storage media including CD, DVD, UMD, flash memory, HD DVD, and Blu-ray to add web content on the fly when the disk is played.
Taiwanese PC maker Acer is reported in VNUnet this week as being about to acquire US PC maker Gateway, for around $710 million, which is a snip or a $4 billion business. Acer will overtake Chinese rival Lenovo as the world’s third largest PC builder after Dell and HP, with worldwide shipments of around 20 million units and sales of $15 billion a year.
Nortel has landed a rare win in IPTV service at Nsight Telservices, a midwestern US regional telco. The system has just gone live and adds TV to existing telephone, Internet and mobility services. The system included a Nortel Ethernet Switch, application switches and routers and software components from Minerva and Widevine.
US encoder specialist Harmonic has added support for 1080p HD encoding at 24 frames per second on its DiviCom Electra 7000 and says that it has landed seven of the ten largest satellite operators worldwide as customers for it. It will show off its next generation H.264 compression at 1080p but as fast as 60 fps at IBC next month. Harmonic also said that Manthan Broadband, a leading cable operator in India, with more 800,000 subscribers, has ordered a complete head end using the DiviCom Ion multi-channel MPEG-2 encoders.
NBC Universal has agreed to acquire Sparrowhawk Holdings and its global portfolio of pay TV channels, including the international Hallmark Channels, from Providence Equity Partners, 3i and management shareholders. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed but Universal gets 18 feeds which air across 152 territories to more than 60 million subscribers in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Latin America and Asia.
Google has got itself a piece of the Time Warner CNN web advertising traffic under its Google’s AdSense advertising program and will deliver site targeted advertising to CNN.com. Google will serve as the exclusive provider of auction-based text advertisements throughout CNN.com.
The owner of Allofmp3, the Russian MP3 service that was cheaply selling Western Music, has been found not guilty of breaking Russian copyright laws and plans to re-start the service. AllofMP3 was closed as part of a negotiation with the World Trade Organization and Russia, which will now presumably go back to the drawing boards. The service never paid any royalties to US and European record labels but apparently instead paid 15% of its profit to a Russian royalty distributor which has not got deals with the major global record labels.
TorrentSpy.com has decided to block all US users ahead of a US court decision that was almost certainly going to switch it off and request its customer addresses. TorrentSpy has servers in the Netherlands, and instead of hosting any pirated movies helps users find unauthorized copies to download with BitTorrent.
Nigeria has opened its own DVB-H mobile TV service through Details Nigeria, which said it has spent over $60 million on the project offering 12 TV channels which will be marketed through African mobile operator MTN.
Apple in the UK has launched video downloads for 28 TV series which show in the UK from its iTunes video store. Customers can buy and keep episodes for £1.89 each ($3.80).
JumpTV has signed an agreement Italian and UK ISP Tiscali to provide UK users with TV shows from 70 countries around the world over its internet portal, but not through its Homechoice IPTV service.
Motorola subsidiaries Symbol Technologies and Wireless Valley Communications have filed a patent infringement case against Aruba Networks saying that it has infringed on patents relating to Wireless LAN site planning and radio frequency management technologies.
Yahoo has bought German mobile in-game advertiser Actionality. It did not give details of what it paid for the company. Actionality embeds games with ads at the point of download and is based in Munich with sales offices in Berlin and Hong Kong.
Yahoo will shut down Yahoo Photos and ask its users to move to Flickr or other rival sites such as market leader PhotoBucket, but Flickr will get top billing. The move comes after massive growth at PhotoBucket which has seen Yahoo Photos down to just 6% of the US market.
uPlayMe, who’s software connects people through their shared tastes in music, movies, TV shows and other digital content, said today that it has closed a multi-million dollar funding round including investments from Warner Music Group, Village Ventures, and other investors. From its desktop application, uPlayMe offers an entertainment-based social network that matches members in real-time based on their recently played songs and videos.