Arm has come out with a graphics accelerator chip, the ARM Mali-400 MP multiprocessor which it says is capable of delivering performance of up to 1 billion pixels per second, enabling licensees to serve multiple product markets with the same architecture, this appears to be aimed mostly at the top end of the HD 1080p set top market and perhaps games consoles, an area where it is not currently represented as far as we can see.
Harmonic says that Sky Italia has deployed its IP-based statistical multiplexing to squeeze as much content into its satellite TV service as it can. The architecture includes Harmonic’s DiviCom Electra 1000 MPEG-2 encoders, ProStream stream processing platform with DiviTrackIP distributed statistical multiplexxing, and NMX Digital Service Manager.
Ankara-based cable TV and satellite operator, Turksat, has chosen to deploy a Conax CAS7 conditional access solution for the new Turksat DTV platform. The cable operator serves over 1.7 million homes across the region.
The US satellite supplier Dish and its sister company EchoStar have asked a US courtroom to declare that its new DVR software no longer infringes Tivo patents. Tivo has been openly saying that the new DVR software infringes just as much as the old software. In our view this is a whole other court process and we doubt a court will give Dish that kind of sanction until the two companies settle. So far Dish is still trying to appeal despite losing every round of its patent infringement suit with of TiVo.
Tribune is thinking about selling off assets from Tribune Media Services (TMS) to ease liquidity, say US newspapers, including its TV listings business which forms the basis of much EPG data in pay TV services as well content aggregation. Tribune has just sold newspaper Newsday to Cablevision for $650 million as part of this same process.
News Corp has completed the acquisition of a 30% stake in TV Riga, a Latvian Russian language free-to-air broadcaster, increasing its ownership to 100%. News Corp now owns 100% of LNT, the leading Latvian entertainment channel, and TV Riga.
Worldwide broadband subscriptions will reach 415 million in 2008, representing one billion discrete broadband users, according to ‘Broadband Forecast: 1H 2008,’a report just released by Strategy Analytics. The number of broadband subscriptions will continue to grow to 621 million by 2012 with DSL the dominant technology, accounting for two-thirds of worldwide subscriptions, but it warns that newer access technologies are taking hold such as fiber and WiMax.
UK research firm Canalys said that the IPTV market will continue to gather momentum over the next four years, and that the number of global IPTV subscribers increased from under 4 million at the end of 2006 to over 10 million at the end of last year, with annualized subscription revenue closing in on the €2 billion ($3.1 billion) mark and by the end of 2011 the company expects IPTV subscribers to reach 67 million.