Spain’s telco Telefonica has announced that it will invest €400 to €500 million in a new deployment plan to take its fibre optic network, with a current reach of 1.3 million households and businesses, to 3 million homes in 2012. The company will focus on Madrid with an investment of €200 million, in comparison with that of over €55 million last year, [...]
Amazon.com has confirmed that Amazon Studios is expanding its development efforts into comedy and children’s series. Amazon Studios is Amazon’s content development division that uses audience feedback to identify original entertainment that customers will love. Series creators are invited to upload their proposals for comedy and children’s programming to Amazon Studios at http://studios.amazon.com/getting-started/series. The best comedy and children’s series will [...]
According to broadband analyst firm Point Topic, global IPTV subscriptions closed in on 60 million at the end of 2011, with the last yearly quarter witnessing the biggest three-month increase in subscribers yet. “The year end is often the strong quarter but in combination with the global recovery in consumer spending and the will and technical ability to deliver a [...]
Satellite operator SES has teamed up with a range of industry partners to develop SAT-IP, an IP-based satellite reception technology that demodulates and converts satellite signals to IP for further in-home distribution to any IP-enabled device. Unveiled at the annual SES Industry Days, the SAT-IP communications protocol is established as a new standard for satellite in-home distribution. A live demo [...]
KPN added 79,000 IPTV subscribers in Q1 2012, taking the total for its Interactive TV service to 652,000. However, KPN’s digital-terrestrial TV service Digitenne continued its decline, seeing 26,000 fewer homes using the service as the primary means of TV viewing, bringing its total down to 801,000. During the presentation of its Q1 results, the Dutch telco revealed that it [...]
Italian public broadcaster RAI has launched Rai.tv World, a new international Internet portal which offers video content that can be enjoyed by TV viewers from around the world. The programme offer includes live news from thematic channel RAI News, the main news programmes from RAI’s terrestrial TV channels, sports news and live radio. Also available is RAI Replay, which provides [...]
Findings from two recent reports by market research firm Infonetics Research suggest that pay-TV operators continue to increase their investments in MPEG-4 encoders, while despite healthy unit growth in set-top box (STB) sales, revenue was flat. “Two of the most interesting trends in the video equipment and set-top box markets are 1) across the board, pay-TV operators continue to increase [...]
The move to an all-IP world where everything is connected presents a major threat to telecom operators’ core voice and SMS revenues, but also significant opportunities for these operators to extract value from adjacent markets. This is one of the main findings of Telecom Operators: Let’s Face It, the 11th edition of the annual report from global management consultancy Arthur [...]
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield, writing for the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival’s Future of Film blog, has suggested that forcing consumers to attend/pay for a movie in a theatre for the first three-four months of a film’s lifespan is increasingly archaic, with advances in display technology meaning the stage is set for the ‘home’ to become the new ‘theatre’. Accordingly, Greenfield [...]
IP-based communications service provider Level 3 Communications has completed a substantial expansion of the global capacity of its content delivery network (CDN). The expansion, which was completed in less than two years, more than doubles the company’s CDN capacity to support customer growth and increased demand. Level 3 has increased its globally available CDN capacity to more than 5.6 Tbps [...]
