Broadcom has acquired Sunext Design a subsidiary of Sunext Technology and has licensed some of its optical disk reader and writer technology. Sunext Technology is a privately-held fabless semiconductor company that specializes in optical storage, which it hopes is going to help Broadcom nail down the Blu-ray chip market. The company says that the Sunext front-end technology complements its own system-on-a-chip back-end and will help drive player prices down.
Deutsche Telekom has lowered the price of its IPTV services, but they were so vastly over priced that it is unlikely to change the take up rate there. The cut is just 17% with the Comfort package €10 cheaper at €49.95 a month. The company also said that it will continue to roll out VDSL and ADSL2+ homes and will bring them to 20 million households by the end of the year.
Tandberg Television, now part of Ericsson, said that the Dubai based du group will use its iPlex encoders, inherited from its US SkyStream acquisition, for the IPTV head end in the United Arab Emirates, including its UltraCompression HD transcoding system.
The Swiss Kudelski Group had revenues up 33% to 926 million Swiss Francs ($894 million) but halved its profit down to 67.4 million Swiss Francs ($65 million) due to lower than expected results for acquisition OpenTV which it said has now been integrated and which along with conditional access subsidiary Nagravision, is opening up the digital TV and IPTV markets with deals at Numericable, Canal Digitaal, Reliance, Portugal Telecom and TV Cabo. The company said there was a material increase of smart card sales in the Indian, South Korean and particularly in the Chinese markets and that it maintains a 95% market share in mobile TV driven by its success in Italy, with deals in Russia, Latin America, and the Czech Republic soon going to volume and it said it expects success in MediaFLO in the US and the Chinese domestic standard StiMi.
After almost a year of bravado and legal actions, almost resulting in the sale of Virgin Media, BSkyB and Virgin are now talking to each other once more about letting the quad play group carry the Sky channels at a reasonable price. Virgin dropped the channels last February, a move which resulted in a complete lack of customer growth for two quarters, and then a recovery based around broadband sales.
US encoder company Harmonic said this week its has captured the Multimedia Polska deal for its new video-on-demand (VOD) service. Multimedia Polska is the first cable operator in Poland to roll out VOD, and the service, initially available in six cities, will be available to its entire digital cable subscriber base by the end of the year. The system uses Harmonic’s StreamLiner video servers and Armada intelligent asset manager.
XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio this week have agreed to extend the Merger Agreement until May 1, 2008. The closing of the merger is still subject to approvals from the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.