Various blog site and the Wall Street Journal all have it that MySpace has or is about to acquire photo sharing site Photobucket, paying something like $250 million, plus a further $50 million in further performance related payments. Photobucket has been looking for a buyer for a few months now and hired Lehman Brothers to help sell the company. Discussions are said to have begun when Photobucket videos were apparently being blocked on MySpace. Photobucket has only generated around $6.3 million in revenues last year and was hoping to more than treble that this year
Microsoft does not, after all the speculation and claimed exclusives of the past week by the New York Post, appear to be buying Yahoo after all. Discussions of this type must happen all the time, the difference is that this particular set of talks got leaked. Our view is that putting MSN and Yahoo together might at first appear to give the two the edge in internet advertising, but with the likely overlaps and the issue of Yahoo’s declining market share, it’s unlikely the two sides could agree a price, and the combined entity might fall well short of being the sum of the two parts.
Joost issued a statement to existing beta users of the software that they could now invite an unlimited number of users to use the site, and the web TV service was reported to have gone into a mini melt-down, with even its advanced P2P architecture unable to cope for a few days. Our own experience is that we cannot get the video to work at all through our router despite following the Joost FAQs in detail and re-configuring the device. An email to tech support has remained unanswered for two weeks. By contrast Skype just works.
Gemstar TV Guide International says that it has signed a patent license agreement with Verizon for using its EPG patents on the FiOS fiber to the home TV service. The two companies have also agreed to collaborate on a system that will enable FiOS TV customers to remotely schedule recordings on FiOS DVRs using TV Guide listings.
EchoStar officially launched MobileDish an in-car satellite TV service, which comes with new antenna technology from RaySat. The device was shown at CES at the beginning of the year 2007 and the system means that even cars that are in motion can watch TV(hopefully not the driver). Dish will offer packages starting at $29.99 a month for 100 channels rising to $42.99 a month for 200 and the Starz Movie Pak can be added separately for $12.99 month. At those prices this may not be competitive enough with satellite radio, which offers some limited video, or with mobile TV services like MediaFLO. EchoStar said this week its revenues rose to $2.64 billion for the quarter up 15% compared to $2.30 billion this time last year. Net income was $157 million up $10million and it added 310,000 subscribers net, taking it to 13.4 million subscribers, closing in rapidly on DirecTV.
Virtually in step with EchoStar (see above), DirecTV says it is also launching what it calls the world’s first portable satellite TV system selling a Sat-Go unit for $1,490 allowing consumers to watch TV wherever they are. Although this is not designed for a moving car, it is targeted at US summer road trips in the same way. The unit comes as a briefcase, with a 17-inch LCD monitor, antenna and rechargeable battery and AC/DC adaptors for the car.
Encoder firm Harmonic says that it has deployed a head end, using DiviCom encoders and DiviTrackXE statistical multiplexing, for Neo Sports Broadcast Pvt. a Nimbus Group Company, offering MPEG-2 video for a new broadcast service in India. The service is available on both cable and satellite and is all about India’s favorite sport, Cricket.
At the same time in India UTStarcom said that it has been awarded contract by Bharti Airtel to launch IPTV services by the end of the year. The two companies have been testing a system in Delhi, and say that a 150 channel lineup will be offered, but so far there is no pricing nor a list of territories where it will be available.
Corporate venturer, activist shareholder and professional pain in the corporate boardroom’s ass, Carl Icahn, has failed to get himself voted onto Motorola’s board. He would probably have made far too much a pest of himself, building a powerbase and would likely have ended up forcing the resignation of CEO Ed Zander, credited with both the recent resurgence at Motorola and its fall from grace over the last few quarters. Icahn had also tried the same tactics at Time Warner which similarly failed. That still doesn’t mean that Zander will necessarily be given the time he needs to turn Motorola around, but it means that he can at least concentrate on the job at hand.
The IPTV tracking service over at Multimedia Research Group (MRG which also partners Rethink on Mobile TV research), has come up with its latest forecast based on the plans of 570 operators, saying that by 2011 IPTV service revenues will bring in $20.3 billion, a growth from today’s $3.6 billion of around 71% CAGR. DSL broadband will grow during the same period from 218 million connections to 353 million a rise of 13% CAGR and IPTV subscriptions will grow from 14.3 million now to 63.6 million by 2011 with Europe leading the way initially and then Asia beginning to catch up. Tantalisingly the update suggests that if Microsoft cannot get its IPTV middleware software working by the middle to end of 2007 AT&T will replace it.
Swiss set top maker ADB says it has reached an agreement with Multimedia Polska to supply HD digital cable set-tops. ADB will supply its ADB-5800C interactive cable STB. Multimedia Polska offers a full triple-play in Poland combining cable TV, telephony and broadband internet and it has 575,000 customers.
Norwegian telco Telenor has agreed to acquire Tele2 Denmark for DKK 835 million ($151 million). Tele2 Denmark is the Danish subsidiary of telco Tele2 and provides fixed, mobile and broadband internet services. The deal takes Telenor’s share of the Danish mobile market to 27.3% and its broadband market share to 14%.