Microsoft announced today via its blog that it will be selling its Mediaroom properties to Ericsson, in a deal that will see Ericsson become the dominant IPTV player in the industry with over 25 percent market share.
Mediaroom operates as a pretty much separate company from Microsoft, with its own HQ in Mountain View and around 400 employees, and powers TV offerings like AT&T U-verse, as… → Read More
Following up from its legal filing yesterday in the U.S., Google has now officially served BT with legal papers for patent infringements in its home market of the UK. While yesterday’s suit concerned enterprise services, the UK finding reveals that Google is using Motorola patents to go after BT, claiming it is making infringements in its IPTV services and its set-top boxes. Thus a legal battle… → Read More
Google today announced another step in the build-out of its Google TV service: it is adding several new international channels in the form of apps to the Google TV platform, aimed at those who live in the U.S. but are missing content from home. Among them are a mix of entertainment and news services, including al-Jazeera, the Chinese-language PPTV, the IslamBox collection of channels, Yupp TV… → Read More
Motorola is the defacto standard for cable company set-top boxes. Nearly every provider uses Moto boxes and software. This installs hope that the accessories Motorola announced today at IBC 2010 in Amsterdam actually have a chance at making it into the average consumer’s life. → Read More
HDTVs are the next consumer electronic battlefield and Samsung is apparently testing out Android on its sets in order to step up their offering in response to the latest from Sony, Apple and others. Currently, Samsung is the world’s leader in HDTVs sold but there’s a shake-up looming and Samsung no doubt wants to retain its title. Android may or may not be the answer. → Read More
Microsoft announced that it has improved its Mediaroom IPTV service to bring more show producers and IPTV networks to its platform.
According to Microsoft, its plan for increasing the value of Mediaroom IPTV contains three parts: increase advertising opportunities, make it easier for IPTV networks to port shows to the platform, and make IPTV more interactive.
The improved Mediaroom platform will… → Read More
I’m here at IFA in Berlin, a stone’s throw away from my temporary base of operations in Barcelona. The show itself—think CES, just run by a bunch of well-dressed Europeans—starts this weekend, but a few companies are having hip-hip hooray press conferences a bit early, announcing new products then quickly putting them back behind a curtain, saying how great they are, etc. → Read More
Flickr’d You guys watch Revision 3, right? Diggnation, Tekzilla (my personal favorite), Totally Rad, etc. The company was DoS’d last week, and you’ll never guess who was responsible. Can you say MediaDefender, the same company the RIAA and MPAA employs to shut down illegal BitTorrent trackers? According to Rev3′s CEO Jim Louderback, the anti-BitTorrent company had been… → Read More
Remember Akimbo? It’s gone now. The company launched an internet-connected hardware box for your TV a few years ago and charged about $10 a month for a handful of channels, some mainstream. After a while, Akimbo abandoned the hardware aspect and made itself into a software service that you could use with, say, Windows Media Center. I tried it for a very brief period of time and found the… → Read More
This adorable graph shows worldwide IPTV penetration. More specifically, it shows the percentage of households per country that watch TV via the Internet. Hong Kong leads the line, followed by Iceland and Estonia. Not a single Western Hemisphere country is listed, which must thrill the likes of NBC (Hulu) and ABC. Certainly, I watch all my TV shows (“Lost,” “the Office,”… → Read More
[photopress:itvnset.jpg,full,center] These are tough times for IPTV service ITVN. The subscription-based service, which offered hundreds of average to above average quality channels (like 600K streams… think really good Internet streaming) to its subscribers, will no longer be offering Setanta Sports starting next month. Setanta Sports, an Irish corp, broadcasts “other” sports… → Read More
Screens of an IPTV interface in the Xbox 360 Dashboard put people into a frenzy. Were these legitimate screen shots, or were they just the work of some lonely teen? Nope, they’re real. Just don’t expect them with the upcoming Fall Update. Microsoft admitted that the screens are real, but that its IPTV services will be rolled out after the Fall Update. On top of that, it’s up to… → Read More
Handset users in Indonesia will get their mobile TV on the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) technology. This same broadcast technology is used for transmitting digital TV to mobile handset users in Japan and Korea, and today Indonesia’s PT Agis announced that it has formed a partnership with IPTV systems integrator Broadband Network Systems (BNS) and Toshiba. Together the partnership will… → Read More
Microsoft just gave its budding IPTV service a shot in the arm and renamed it Mediaroom, which is surely the product of several months of extensive focus group testing. The name isn’t the only thing to change with this update to the service, as Redmond added the ability to share digital music and photos (isn’t that Windows Home Server’s job?) within the home and support for… → Read More
Two things show a company is getting ramped up to enter a business – filing for patents and lining up a trademark. Microsoft has done both in the online video arena and could be in a position to take on Joost. A recently filed trademark image and a look at Joost matched up to Microsoft’s video + chat patent after the jump. → Read More
Look at that! Someone using technology for a good cause and not just to pump out more megapixels or whowhatsits per second. Going by the name of VeeSee, this Britian-based IPTV service (think Joost) caters to deaf people, with programming where British Sign Language is the lingua franca. The company felt there was a lack of deaf person-friendly programming on traditional TV programming to meet… → Read More
Most video-content companies are concentrating on getting their stuff off your computer and onto your TV. Akimbo was already on TVs, however, and is now working on getting that content onto your PC. The company announced today that its Internet video-on-demand service will be available next week in beta release for Windows XP and Vista-based PCs. Akimbo already made it possible for users to get… → Read More
Some exciting news has come out of CeBIT this morning from Samsung, STMicoelectronics and Metalink. They’ve collaborated on a set-top box that they are hoping will revolutionize the way you watch TV. The SMT-H6155 will support HD TV based on the 802.11n wireless IPTV standard. HD video decoding is taken care of with the STMicroelectronics STi7109 chipset and multiple HD video streams are… → Read More
I wasn’t really following the Joost train but now my interest is piqued. Ars Technica got their hands on the OS X client and was duly impressed. Except for a few odd problems, it looks like it’s running quite well and is an exact replica of the Windows client. As much as I like Media Center and hopefully will like Apple TV, this looks like the future. Just as Skype has replaced our… → Read More
Guess what kiddies: we have ourselves yet another product with the letter “I” dropped to a lowercase in the product name. This time around, the culprit is Axion’s iPTV system. Consisting of a box and mobile monitor, this thing is very similar to Sony’s LocationFree jawn. A hardwired box hooks up to your broadband internet connection and streams television and programming to a little… → Read More
This week, BBC News is running a series of stories on the Future Of TV – of course, YouTube, IPTV, mobile TV, BitTorrent and other forms of online TV figure a great deal in these articles; the UK is notoriously namechecked as the source of between 10 and 25% of all TV piracy. It’s fair to say that one of the consequences of Web 2.0 is the increased bias of binary content amongst… → Read More
BT announced today that their IPTV solution, BT Vision will finally launch on 4th December which nicely coincides with the recent announcements about the rollout of BT’s 21CN network in Cardiff. As yet BT have not announced their pricing strategy for BT Vision, but given Sky’s lead in the home entertainment market and their announcement today of Sky Anytime (previously Sky by… → Read More
The Branded Content Marketing Association (BCMA) is running a series of paid for events in September at The Arts Club, London, focusing on the topic of IPTV. Following the recent acquistion of HomeChoice by Tiscali and imminent launch of BT Vision, IPTV looks set to become one of THE hot topics in the UK over the next few years. The BCMA are running the following three events: Part 1… → Read More
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