Category: Software

The unit will be headed by president Sarah Chubb.

Prior to this, Chubb was president of CondeNet – the unit that oversaw destination sites like Epicurious.com and Style.com.

Chubb will report to company president and CEO Chuck Townsend.

Townsend said, “The latest move was not a cost-cutting measure but a new step to make it easier to sell advertising across the sites.”

“By creating the new digital division Condé Nast has changed its long term strategy of keeping its destination sites separate from those of its individual magazines,” he added.

The company had earlier separated the content-related operations of its magazines‘ standalone from CondéNet by handing over the sites to respective editors, leaving CondéNet to focus on its destination sites although CondéNet continued to handle online sales of all the sites.

Condé Nast Digital will now combine these internet venues with individual magazine-branded sites and other, non-magazine digital assets.

The original date for the changeover was 17 February. However, the Senate has voted to delay the date until 12 June as the move would give consumers the time to obtain $40 vouchers towards the purchase of digital TV converter boxes for analog televisions.

The main reason that US President Barack Obama has cited for the quick move to put off the transition is that there are an estimated 6.5 million American homes that are not ready for the transition.

The House of Representatives will vote on the bill now.

Meanwhile, cable companies and broadcasters believe that they will incur additional costs if the deadline is extended by another four months as they have already spent millions of dollars preparing consumers for the transition.

However, this installed base of households is decidedly biased to two countries: the US and Japan. Further, within the US market, there is a significant gap between HDTV ownership and households utilising HD programming, reports In-Stat.

The number of US HDTV households, defined as households having both an installed HD-capable TV set and also receiving and watching HD programming, increased by almost 40 per cent in 2008. However, the growth rate could well have been much larger.

“In the US, there are more than 39 million households with an installed HDTV set,” according to Mike Paxton, an In-Stat analyst. “However, only 22 million of those are HDTV households, meaning that 17 million US households with an installed HDTV set are not watching HD programming.”

Recent research by In-Stat also found the following:

* On a global basis, HDTV service remains limited to a relatively small number of countries, primarily the US and Japan.

* At year-end 2008, there were over 36 million HDTV households worldwide, up from 29 million at year-end 2007.

* Even though the number of European HDTV households is rising, it will be 2011 before the number of HDTV households in that region reaches the 10 million mark.

* Cable and satellite TV service providers provide HD programming to almost 80 per cent of all HDTV households. Telco TV service providers and terrestrial broadcast TV service providers provide service to the remaining HDTV households.

This is an improvement of more than 1.3 million homes since Nielsen reported readiness status at the end of December.

Under government-mandated action, all television stations are required to switch to digital programming by 17 February, 2009, which will leave viewers without a television signal unless they purchase digital television sets, connect to cable, satellite, and alternate delivery systems or purchase a converter box.

Nielsen‘s information is based on the same national and local television ratings samples that are used to generate national and local television ratings.

To conduct the survey, Nielsen representatives observed and tabulated the actual televisions used in its samples. Because Nielsen has developed samples that reflect the total US population including African American and Hispanic populations, these household characteristics in the samples can be projected to the whole country.

Nielsen Vice Chair Susan Whiting says, “Nielsen has been preparing for the transition to digital television for more than two years. Because we recognise that accurate and reliable information on consumer behavior is essential to this transition, we’ve been sharing our data with clients, government leaders and the public so they could track progress to digital readiness.”

Nielsen Hispanic/Latino Advisory Council (HLAC) Ernest W Bromley says, “There are still millions of people who will be adversely affected because they are not ready for the digital transition. So it’s critical that we provide them with the information and resources they need to stay connected with the world.”

Local Market Rankings : Among the 56 local markets that Nielsen measures with electronic meters, the one that is least ready is Albuquerque-Santa Fe, with 12.4 per cent of the households completely unready. The most prepared market is Hartford and New Haven, with only 1.8 per cent of homes unready.

MUMBAI: Online social network ibibo.com has announced the appointment of Sanjay Bhasin as executive VP, revenues and business development

.

In this role, Bhasin will drive ad sales and business development functions to monetise ibibo.com‘s properties.

Bhasin has 18 years of experience and has played a critical role with different media and entertainment houses. He has been part of many founding teams of various businesses like radio and television ventures of Times of India and Walt Disney‘s launch in the country.

ibibo.com CEO Ashish Kashyap says, “We are delighted to have Sanjay come on board on ibibo. Sanjay has built successful business from a start up level and brings with him a rolodex of experience across functions and media industries – TV

, Radio and Internet”.

Before joining ibibo.com, Bhasin was VP, network sales of UTV channels. Before his stint with UTV, Sanjay was the associate director at Walt Disney India.

The joint CEOs will replace Havas global CEO Don Epperson, who is leaving the group to pursue personal projects.

Says Havas Media CEO Alfonso Rodes, “Joint management structures and teams have worked exceptionally well for us in the group and we are delighted that these dynamic and talented managers will be taking us forward. Under their guidance Havas Digital has achieved market leading growth, doubling in size every two years.”

The co-CEOs will be tasked with leading the global group with a focus on client services, product development and new initiatives.

NEW DELHI: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has released a consultation paper to seek the views of the service providers on the bandwidth required for ISPs for better connectivity and improved quality of service.

Once the comments are received, Trai aims to develop a framework which will strengthen the existing regulations on quality of broadband service.

In the consultation paper that was released on Thursday, Trai said that there was a strong requirement to identify easily monitorable and enforceable QoS measures. This was particularly in regard to access speed to ensure that a bare minimum (floor) bandwidth is available with service providers for provisioning of broadband and internet services with reasonable assured quality to its subscribers.

“The concept of virtual office and remote office is gaining popularity. E-Commerce, E- health, Video world, Virtual tours and E-marts are some other emerging popular applications that require huge bandwidth which are also time sensitive. In such a scenario, quality of service becomes of prime importance,” elaborated Trai.

In the consultation paper Trai has sited various instances when subscribers allege speed of their broadband connections is much less than subscribed speed.

The regulator has announced 2 February as the last of submission of comments by the stakeholders.

Mehta will be responsible for the strategic and operational leadership of Komli Media‘s overall business operations including sales, product development, engineering, marketing and business development.

Mehta joins Komli Media after eight years at Yahoo! , where he was most recently VP and head of monetisation for Yahoo!‘s emerging markets group which included India, South East Asia, Latin America, Middle East and Eastern Europe. Based in Yahoo!‘s regional headquarters in Singapore, Mehta led sales, business and publisher development, advertising products and platforms for one of the company‘s fastest growing divisions.

During his tenure, he developed the overall vision and strategy for monetisation and helped drive the acceleration and deployment of key initiatives such as Right Media, reseller networks, sales channel development and search marketing in the region. He was also a key member of Yahoo!‘s global alliances team, driving Yahoo!‘s strategic partnerships with AT&T Wireless, eBay, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase.

Commenting on the partnership, Virgin Mobile India chief officer (handsets and VAS) Deval Parikh said, “With more and more online youth community logging onto social networking sites, we wanted to make this service available to our customers on a broad set of handsets. We are thrilled to be the first to have partnered with MySpace in the Indian mobile service space to make this service accessible to Virgin Mobile customers.”

“MySpace and Virgin Mobile users in India will love having the freedom and convenience of accessing their social network while they’re on the go. With India being the fastest growing wireless/mobile market, it is a priority for us to provide our users in India access to their MySpace network in ways that fit their lifestyle. Virgin Mobile is an ideal partner that will help us deliver on that strategy in India,” added MySpace VP and GM – Mobile John Faith.

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NEW DELHI: Even as the Government turned down its request for enlarging the scope of the existing district level monitoring committees to monitor the proposed Quality of Service (QoS) Regulations, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today extended the last date for comments from stakeholders on its consultation paper on “Quality of Service issues for Cable TV Services in non-Cas areas and for DTH Services” until 10 January.

Prior to this extension, stakeholders were supposed to submit their feedback by 31 December 2008.

Earlier on 1 December 2008, Trai had issued the consultation paper on ‘Quality of service issues for Cable TV services in non-Cas areas and for DTH services.‘

For direct-to-home (DTH) services, Trai had sought opinion on QoS issues pertaining to dropping of channels by the service providers, maintenance and visiting charges, and protection to subscribers regarding their tariff plans.

In the paper, Trai had also written to various state governments for effective monitoring and enforcement of quality of service parameters, once the regulations are issued for non-Cas areas, noting that the enforcement of the proposed regulations is a challenging task.

Meanwhile, information and broadcasting ministry sources confirmed to indiantelevision.com that Trai, which had made the recommendation in a letter sent late last month, was informed in a reply that the committees had been set up for a certain purpose and could not take up the work of monitoring QoS of operators.

In a letter to Trai chairman Nripendra Misra, Ministry secretary Sushma Singh said the monitoring committees were constituted “with a view to monitor the content shown on private TV channels,” and it would not be advisable “to enlarge the scope of the committees.”

“Even if the scope of the district monitoring committees were to be enlarged to receive complaints as suggested by you, there is nothng much which n authorised officer of the committee can do by way of penalising a cable operator if he does not redress the grievance or comply with the regulations,” Singh has told Misra.