French financial magazine Challenges started the rumor this week that frantic trading in Eutelsat shares meant that French broadcasting group TDF was about to buy it. Paris-based Eutelsat has 23 satellites that cover all of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and significant parts of Asia and the Americas. At the end of 2006, Eutelsat was broadcasting over 2,400 television channels and 1,000 radio stations and recently it entered a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent to put up a satellite especially for mobile TV, using Alcatel’s DVB-SH. A price tag of €8 billion for the acquisition was guessed at by the French magazine.
We reported on the letter sent by the IAB Interactive Advertising Bureau last issue to both comScore and Nielsen Net Ratings calling for them both to be audited. Discussions have now been held and both comScore and Nielsen have agreed to undergo such an audit by the MRC. Nielsen saying it is comfortable to get full accreditation.
Thomson Grass Valley used NAB to show its new Mustang chip to offer High Definition compression which will come out in actual encoder products in the second half of 2007. Grass Valley reckons that it can offer HDTV in as little as 4Mbps. Existing encoders offer around 8 Mbps to 10 Mbps for HD. The Grass Valley move follows a trend among encoder builders of chasing their own specialized silicon, and Harmonic recently came to market with an encoder using the Ambarella system on a Chip encoder.
Imagine Communications said this week that it was integrating its Variable Bit Rate statistical multiplexing technology with Tandberg Television’s OpenStream Switched Digital Video Platform, aimed at the cable market.
The company says this will allows operators to offer up to 50% more streams for each 256 QAM channel, as many as three High Definition streams or fifteen SD streams.
A US judge said this week that downloads of music do not qualify as public performances, and so there is no need to pay for a public performance license and make more royalty payments when offering an online service. The ruling came after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) began pushing for the extra payments and began a legal action to clarify its position. The claim had been dismissed as ‘double dipping’ and some services may now be able to reclaim payments paid in the past for both a digital delivery royalty and a public performance fee.
The US Supreme Court ruled this week that Microsoft should not be liable to AT&T for a global penalty for putting a utility to compress speech onto PCs, but only in the US, given that this was the reach of the AT&T patent. Microsoft counsel said, ‘Today’s Supreme Court decision is important for the entire information technology industry, adding clarity and balance to our patent system. This decision promotes a global patent system that works. The ruling ensures that US courts, like courts elsewhere, can respect the patent laws of other countries, helping promote cooperation among patent systems worldwide. Microsoft said it though that both the Alcatel-Lucent and Eolas cases might be revisited, or at least the levels of damages awarded may be revisited, in light of this ruling.
MobiTV co-founder Phillip Alvelda said he will step down as the company’s CEO to focus on and Educational Instutute he co-founded last year. He will remain as chairman and the company will seek a new CEO from outside. The other MobiTV co-founder, Paul Scanlan will move to president, and other senior management will shift upwards.
Mobile TV chip maker Siano Mobile Silicon has teamed up with Vishay Intertechnology, to launch what it claims is the world’s smallest UHF antenna for mobile TV applications. Vishay is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of discrete components, diodes, rectifiers, transistors, and optoelectronics. Most mobile TV handsets in UHF, including those used to work with Korea’s T-DMB and its S-DMB services, and MediaFLO in the US, have a small telescopic antenna attached, which is one of the factors that users cite as least attractive about the systems. The new device called the SMS8021 by Siano is no larger than a typical handset integrated circuit, and eliminates will go into mobile phones, portable multimedia players, notebooks and UMPCs, and accessory cards.
Sony said this week it would launch eyeVio, its own Japanese video-sharing site, a move designed to stop YouTube’s dominance in Japan. News Corp and NBC Universal have already said they would launch a similar site in the US later this year. eyeVio will be launched initially in Japan and then spread to other countries if Sony thinks it is gaining acceptance. Sony promised it would use copyright filtering technology from the start, unlike YouTube which has found itself on the wrong end of legal actions due to copyrighted material dominating the snippets of video stored on YouTube.
The NY Times says that Yahoo has gone ahead and is about to acquire Right Media a 4-year-old company that runs an auction market place for advertising, similar to Google’s auctioning system. The move was said to be triggered by Google buying DoubleClick, and Yahoo is moving from a 20% stake in the company to full ownership, paying a whopping $680 million in half and half, stock and cash. The DoubleClick deal when Google acquired it for $3.1 billion made Google more of a direct threat to Yahoo display advertising.