In what free time I have, I am resuming a personal blog. Any views and opinions expressed here are therefore my own and are not endorsed by my employer.
My friends at Broadband TV News are reporting that FetchTV, the UK hybrid DTT platform, has contracted ANT to integrate its technology into the European HbbTV platform.
As I reported yesterday, the first retail HbbTVproducts have begun shipping to Germany on the back of a collaboration between ANT and Humax.
The move is an interesting one given that Fetch TV is the only UK hybrid DTT platform to which BSkyB has licensed its Sky Player technology. Given BSkyB's complaints about the rival Canvas platform (supported by the BBC, ITV, BT and now others), it does rather look as if BSkyB is backing HbbTV - if only at one remove. After all, Sky must surely have known about Fetch TV's plans for HbbTV when it did the deal.....
There had been a lot of scepticism about the timetable in some quarters, but I have just received a press release from Humax and ANT that the first set-top boxes using the newly-defined European hybrid standard HbbTV began shipping to German retail outlets earlier this month.
The new Humax box is the iCord HD+, and it integrates the ANT Galio HbbTV platform. At IBC, ANT told me there would be a pre-Christmas HbbTV launch in Germany - and though I await details of numbers shipped - it does indeed appear to have happened.
HbbTV is seen in some quarters as a European rival to the UK's Canvas standard (apparently about to be green-lighted by the BBC Trust) - although not everyone agrees.
Just going through my notes from the Future TV Advertising Forum, and saw this point from Tess Alps, CEO of Thinkbox, the UK commercial TV networks' marketing arm (she was addressing the trend according to which advertisers are pulling money out of TV and spending it on the Internet instead). "A lot of what you call 'online' advertising in the statistics is going to video online - it's really TV advertising [by any other name]." Alps went on to say that advertising against online video was in fact the fastest-growing element of online advertising.
It would be interesting to see the research which shows that. Can anyone point me to a source?
Just 3% of smartphone users are consuming 40% of AT&T's capacity - mainly as a result of video and audio streaming.
An argument for adopting a one-to-many mobile broadcast TV model, perhaps? Trouble is, the dedicated broadcast networks required are too expensive to build - cf DVB-H's travails in France.
Two straws in the wind: Orange's backing of the GSMA-endorsed IMB standard (a mobile broadcast technology which re-uses existing licensed 3G frequencies); and the launch of a Solaris Mobile test DVB-SH network in Paris (which uses a single pan-European satellite slot and re-uses existing 3G masts for terrestrial re-broadcasts in the S-Band - adjacent to 3G).
No accident that both developments involved the French, whose DVB-H platform remains dead-locked for want of support.
CableLabs - the US cable TV standards body - has finally published my overview of the MHP market in their SPECS newsletter (click here for the article).
Two related developments that were too late to make it into the piece:
Italy's Senate approved a budget bill for 2007 just before Christmas that includes a measure aimed at subsidising integrated digital TV sets (IDTVs), and which the digital-terrestrial TV lobby would dearly like to make conditional on MHP being included in the sets. If so, it would represent another big boost for the European interactive TV standard (which, incidentally, is included as part of the DVD Blu-Ray spec). Full story in this week's New Media Markets.
Via Licensing, the LA-based outfit which brings together the MHP patent holders in a patent licensing pool, tells me the patent-holders still haven't signed off on the MHP patent licensing agreements. Given that all it takes is a simple signature, there must be something afoot, surely (sign-off was expected by early autumn 2006). Rumour has it that one of the patent-holders could have dropped out.
