Category: Software

MUMBAI: US telecom major AT&T Inc. is offering subscribers a new kind of TV remote control: their cell phones.

The company will begin offering its Homezone customers the ability to control their digital video recorders through Web-enabled phones. The interface allows cell phone users to remotely schedule or delete recordings from their set-top boxes connected to satellite television service.

The downloadable programming was also being expanded to include 12,000 programs from Akimbo, ranging from movies to concerts to how-to videos. AT&T previously had content agreements with Yahoo Inc. and Movelink.

Homezone is a service that uses a set-top box to help deliver content over the Internet to televisions, including on-demand movies, caller ID and photos stored on the home computer. The company will not disclose how many subscribers Homezone has, but the service has far broader reach than U-verse, the premium service AT&T hopes will help it eventually win back cable customers.

AT&T is still slowly expanding U-verse, but the rollout has been delayed because of software difficulties with the service delivered over a high-speed Internet connection. AT&T said it would begin offering U-verse in Dallas-Fort Forth on Tuesday, its 14th market for the service.

Patrick Comack, an analyst with Zachary Investment Research, said the Homezone box, made by 2Wire is convergence technology strong enough to allow AT&T to compete with cable providers, but in the long term, the success might breed other challenges.

“There’s going to be a lot of Homezone boxes, and it’s going to create a problem when AT&T wants to migrate them to U-verse down the road,” he said.

MUMBAI: US broadcaster fox has announced that Dan Fawcett has been named as president of digital media.

The appointment, effective immediately, marks a return to Fox for Fawcett who spent the past three years as DirecTV executive VP programming and business and legal affairs.

Fawcett will look to further the growth and evolution of digital media strategy, including exploiting Fox content across all digital platforms, pursuing long-term tactical initiatives with major technology players and developing additional revenue streams for Fox product.

News Corp president and COO Peter Chernin “Dan has a deep understanding of this company and a strong history over the past decade in structuring and negotiating successful distribution deals on numerous platforms.

“Our digital media group has already launched one of the most aggressive expansions into the digital space of any media company and we’re confident that under Dan’s leadership it will continue to get stronger, more innovative and more competitive.”

Fawcett says, This is a tremendous opportunity to help define new and widening frontiers. Fox Digital Media has been on the leading edge of the digital arena and I look forward to creating and advancing initiatives that will keep us at the forefront of this emerging landscape.”

NEW DELHI: English news channel NDTV 24×7 is to be converted into a free to air (FTA) channel in the Cas-notified areas of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata from
23 March.

The channel, which is already FTA in Chennai, is a pay channel in Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. NDTV 24×7 is distributed by the Set-Discovery One Alliance distribution bouquet.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India today issued an order to this effect, thus updating their earlier press releases, placing the details of Maximum Retail Prices (MRP) fixed by the broadcasters in respect of Cas areas on the basis of the reporting done by them in terms of clause 7 (ii) of the Trai Order of 31 August, last year.

The Trai press release said that the change had been made as the Authority had been informed subsequent to issuing its Tariff Order, that the channel, which was then encrypted, would be made free-to-air in some of the notified areas.

Detailing the reasons for the move, an NDTV spokesperson told indiantelevision.com that the channel is a “pay channel everywhere in the country except in the Cas regions”.

The spokesperson explained also that CAS area viewers account for less than five per cent of the total viewers in the nation.

Seeding of boxes, the spokesperson argued, has been much slower than anticipated, partly due to shortage of boxes and partly due to lower demand than expected.

“Seeding of boxes is so slow that it is less than 10 per cent in Kolkata, less than 15 per cent in Delhi and 20-25 per cent in Mumbai.

“This means that 80-90 per cent of homes in the CAS areas do not get pay channels. It makes business and journalistic sense to go free to air for a short period and go back to “pay” when there are more boxes seeded in the CAS areas, the spokesperson concluded.

NEW DELHI: The conditional access system implementation “has been a huge success story”, and the proof of this lies in the fact that in the past few weeks, three major delegations from foreign investment portfolio management companies have approached the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, according to Trai‘s advisor RN Choubey.

Though Choubey did not wish to reveal the names of the companies – one of them being from Singapore, he did say that they all had portfolios worth a billion dollars to invest, and had come here because with Cas in place, they see a vast level of certainty being introduced in the previously shapeless and non-addressable cable TV market in India.

Choubey, who made these observations in an intercation with indiantelevision.com yesterday, said Cas was spreading out beyond the designated areas and being implemented voluntarily in some places. Said Choubey: “The largest MSO in Pune has introduced Cas on its own, without waiting for government support, because that is not a designated Caa city, and in Orissa too, a company called Ortel is introducing Cas in some of the cities in the state.”

These are developments over the past 20 days, he said, clarifying, however, that in these areas the price will be determined by market play and pay channels would not be available for Rs 5 as in the case of the mandated areas of south of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.

MSOs operating in the mandated areas are free to sell or rent STBs to any of the areas, and neither Trai nor the government would stop them, drawing attention to the fact that the I&B minister had recently gone on record that the government would like to extend Cas.

He denied that there has been a slowdown in Cas, arguing that what the market is seeing now is a plateau.

“There has been no slowdown,” he asserted, saying the figures till 6 March shows that in the mandated areas, 503,000 boxes have been seeded in the three metros and the daily rate of new connections stands at around 1,000.

South Delhi has seen 214,000 boxes being seeded so far, with Mumbai taking marginally higher, 239,000 till date.

Explaining the relative lukewarm growth in Kolkata, he said it has followed somewhat the Chennai model, where the choice vernacular channels are all FTA.

He admitted that as per the TAM reports, the cable TV universe in the Cas designated parts of the three metros is about 1.6 million. Of this, less than a third of them are on STBs. He however argued that with 1,000 STB seedings daily, and with more than 185,000 boxes available with the MSOs, there is neither any shortage of boxes nor of demand.

Pressed about the plateau appears to have been reached, he ascribed it as being because customers are taking time to make up their minds.

On the issue of Quality of Service, Choubey revealed that the MSOs have been asked to send the results of their surveys, and these are done on a quarterly basis, so the first survey results would be available some time in April.

But would those be foolproof?

“There are a dozen parameters on QoS,” Choubey says, and we shall check the results. Their statements are verifiable because there would be SMS data.

“But if we suspect something, if we feel that the data is not correct, Trai itself shall launch a door-to-door survey when it feels necessary.”

MUMBAI: Preparations are in the final stages for the launch of Isro‘s latest satellite, Insat-4B, on board Ariane-5 ECA launch vehicle from Kourou, French Guiana.

The launch window for the Ariane-5, carrying Insat-4B and its co-passenger Skynet 5A of EADS Astrium, is fixed between 03:55 am and 04:28 am Indian Standard Time on 11 March (7:25 pm to 7:58 pm 10 March, in Kourou).

Insat-4B is the second satellite to be launched in the Insat-4 series. Insat-4B carries 12 high power Ku-band transponders and 12 C-band transponders to augment the capacity for direct-to-home (DTH) television services apart from augmenting the Insat capacity for other communication and television services.

The Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan in Karnataka is in readiness to take control of Insat-4B soon after Ariane-5 places it in the Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) of 250 km x 35,886 km.

In the following days after launch, MCF will conduct orbit raising manoeuvres to take the satellite into the final 36,000 km circular Geosynchronous Orbit followed by deployment of solar arrays and antennas. Insat-4B will be positioned at 93.5 degree East longitude along with Insat-3A. This will be followed by in-orbit test of the communication payloads. MCF will also carry out regular operations and control of the satellite during its service life.

The Rs 3 billion telecom satellite, which is identical to Insat-4A, carries 12 Ku-band and 12 C-band transponders. European space consortium Arianespace will carry out the launch. It will cost around $ 50 million.

Kalanithi Maran‘s Sun Group has booked seven Ku-band transponders on Insat-4B for its soon to launch (DTH) service Sun Direct, while Prasar Bharati‘s free-to-air (FTA) package DD Direct Plus has booked five.

Sun will be using MPEG-4 technology that will allow it to compress more TV channels per transponder. While MPEG-2 can pack in around 12 channels, the advanced compression technology will be able to accommodate over 20 channels.

Sun may consider itself lucky that the launch of Insat-4C satellite failed in July 2006 after the rocket carrying it veered off course and exploded. Sun had booked six Ku-band transponders (and one more for digital satellite news gathering) on it for its DTH service.

By being located on the same satellite, Sun‘s subscribers will be able to access DD Direct‘s channels without it having to separately put them on its transponders.

Live Transmission: Live Transmission of Insat-4B launch from Kourou will be available for Indian TV channels to relay the programme to their viewers. Details of live transmission are as follows:

Date : Sunday, 11 March
Time : 3:30 am to 5:15 am
(Test Transmission 12:55 am to 1:25 am)
Satellite: Asiasat-2
Location: 100.5 deg. E
Transponder : 7A
Channel : 4
Downlink : 3913 MHz
Polarisation : Vertical
Symbol Rate : 6.1113
FEC : 3/4
Kind of Signal : 9 MHz, DVB, PAL

MUMBAI: MSN India will stream live music concerts by Evanescence, Elton John and The Pussycat Dolls for its users at www.msn.com.

Speaking on the concerts slated for this month MSN India executive producer Krishna Prasad said, “After the huge response we got from our users for the live concerts on MSN Control Room, it‘s our pleasure to continue to provide them with music from the best artists across the globe.

This month we have Evanescence, The Pussycat Dolls and Elton John entertaining our users. We will have many more groups to look forward to in the months to come.”

Beyonce Knowles, Snoop Dogg, Kylie Minogue and John Mayer are some of the names that music lovers have tuned into on MSN‘S Control Room.

The ‘Evanescence Live from Zepp in Tokyo‘ will be streamed on 8 March while the Elton John concert from live from Madison Square Garden, New York will be streamed on 26 March.

MSN India had announced its association with Control Room in October last year. The partnership will see MSN as the exclusive online worldwide destination for Control Room‘s live music programming, via live and on-demand streaming.

MUMBAI: Cyworld service‘s Korean SK communications president and CEO Dr Hyun-Oh Yoo will give a keynote address at MipTV featuring Milia.

Speaking for the first time at the European event, Dr Hyun-Oh Yoo will discuss the reasons for Cyworld‘s success and talk about his vision for the future of lifestyle media.

Created in 1999, Cyworld is an online social network which enables subscribers to create their own identities and connect to others.

The multi-platform service also offers video or photo sharing and music distribution. It has attracted 96 percent of Korean 20-29 year-olds with over 20 million subscribers. The network exists in Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan and more recently the US.

Dr Hyun-Oh Yoo will give his keynote on Wednesday 18 April as part of MipTV featuring Milia‘s 2007 conference programme entitled “capture innovation.”

The conferences will focus on mobile media and IPTV developments, and will take place in the Palais des Festivals, Cannes, France.

MUMBAI: The TV18 Group‘s, Internet arm, Web18, has acquired a majority stake in Bigtree Entertainment which works in the area of movie and entertainment ticketing.

This investment will further strengthen the group‘s position in the Internet and mobile transactions space

Over the past eight years, Bigtree has established a strong brand presence in the Indian market by offering its integrated entertainment ticketing solutions and services across 35 cities in India.

Bigtree says that it fulfills an important need for the entertainment industry by providing ticketing applications to cinemas and entertainment venues. This is done through a suite of software products ranging from box office ticketing, concessions management, web ticketing, mobile ticketing, loyalty management software, film programming, bar code ticketing, voucher management, etc.

Bigtree also specialises in ticket selling services to end consumers. Cinemas and event organizers are offered a complete solution through 16 call centers, Internet ticketing and a mobile ticketing platform. The company provides the necessary software, processes, systems, door delivery options, cash collection, warehousing and accounting services, and currently handles over 2.5 million ticketing transactions annually for all major exhibition chains/centres across the country.

Web18 had acquired a majority stakes in Yatra.com and Jobstreet.com India a few months ago.

TV18 Group CEO Haresh Chawla says, “This acquisition is in line with our strategy to strengthen our position in the Consumer Internet space. The Internet and Mobile markets are key to the Group‘s future and growth

MUMBAI: Software major Microsoft has accused online major Google of profiting off sites that sell pirated video and software.

Microsoft lawyer Thomas Rubin has been quoted in reports stating that Google‘s track record of protecting copyrights was weak and that it had encouraged the use of keywords and advertising text referring to pirated content. Microsoft has also claimed that Google cuts into authors‘ profits with its Google Books Search service.

In a speech Rubin points out that Google that creates no original content of its own has no problem making billions in ad revenue off of others‘ content. Rubin talked not only of the problems Google has had with content on video sharing site YouTube but also its program of making digital copies of books from libraries.

Google‘s stated policy of making only snippets of copyrighted books available, Rubin says, asks copyright holders to put far too much trust in the company.

Reports state that the offensive from Microsoft comes as it is seeking to work with media companies to fight piracy on its own video-sharing site Soapbox.

Rubin says, “Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs. Authors and publishers often find it difficult just to cover their costs, let alone make a profit, in this new online world.

“Google takes a unilateralist or ‘opt out‘ approach where the practice is to simply to ‘take‘ the works of others, without any regard for copyright or the impact of their actions on authors and publishers. Microsoft doesn’t believe that is the right approach.”

Rubin spoke at the Association of American Publishers (AAP) annual meeting. The AAP has been tied up in litigation with Google for the past year and a half.

MUMBAI: Alcatel-Lucent, which provides solutions that enable service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide, to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users has announced that its customer TDC in Denmark has rolled-out a nationwide commercial IPTV service.

With the recent TDC TVlaunch, TDC has inaugurated Denmark’s largest interactive TV network with service available to more than 1.6 million households.

Building on Alcatel-Lucent’s commitment to support service providers in delivering a truly converged TV experience, this milestone follows TDC’s selection of Alcatel-Lucent’s IPTV offering, including the Microsoft IPTV Edition software platform, in 2006. Alcatel-Lucent says that it enables TV, video and music services for more than 110 fixed and mobile service providers around the world.

The solution delivered to TDC includes Alcatel-Lucent services integration as well as the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition software platform. Based on this solution, TDC TV subscribers will benefit from an enriched entertainment experience with broadband access to 35 television channels, an electronic program guide, digital recorder with pause feature, and access to more than 200 movie titles available at their convenience via video on demand technology. The network is also HDTV-ready.

TDC Solutions president Gert Rieder says, “The new generation of TDC TV is one of TDC’s most important growth projects within broadband for many years. This is one example of how broadband will be playing a still greater role in our everyday lives in the future.

“We deliver telephony, Internet, and TV through one and the same wall outlet. This is clearly the most user-friendly solution in the market because it is interactive and offers convenient access to individual content preferences such as on-demand movie rentals.”