HP to acquire 3Com

HP and 3Com Corporation today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase 3Com at a price of $7.90 per share in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion.

HP said the acquisition would expand its Ethernet switching offering, add routing solutions and strengthen its position in China. HP will also gain a foothold in the network security space through 3Coms TippingPoint brand.

Logitech to acquire LifeSize Communications

Logitech International announced that it has agreed to acquire privately held LifeSize Communications of Austin, Texas for $405 million in cash. LifeSize is a global leader in high definition (HD) video communication solutions, with more than 9,000 video conferencing customers across 80 countries in large enterprises, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and public healthcare, education and government organizations.

Logitech and LifeSize plan to pursue existing and new relationships with unified communications, collaboration and VoIP industry partners and competitors to drive the development of an open eco-system for interoperable video communication.

Read the press release and the comments on NY Times.

Disruptive impact of SVC on videoconference

In the report "H.264 SVC: A Technical Assessment" Wainhouse Research compares SVC (Scalable Video Coding) to the H.264 Baseline Profile used in traditional video-conferencing systems and conclude that SVC videoconferencing systems can:

• Provide the ability to host video calls on lower cost, loss-prone IP networks, including the Internet, with equal or better quality than that of traditional systems

• Support video calls between endpoints with widely varying processor power and network connection
  
  
• Deliver much improved interactivity due to noticeable shorter delays on both point-to-point calls and multipoint calls between H.264 SVC-compliant systems
  
  
• Support an impressive reduction in the cost of multipoint infrastructure hardware

Source: Marketwire.

UHDTV market forecast

The recent In-Stat research "The Market Opportunity for Ultra-High Definition Video" covers the availability of ultra-high definition (7680 x 4320 and 3840 x 2160 pixels) TV units and the availability of ultra-high definition services around the world. In-Stat analysts found the following:

• The rising popularity of high resolution digital cinema will expose consumers to high resolution content. Then, early UHDTVs will be made available to provide a digital cinema high resolution viewing experience in the home. Ultimately, broadcasters will start offering UHD content to an addressable market of UHDTVs between 2017 and 2022.
  
  
• In-Stat expects the total installed base of UHDTVs Europe to approach 5% household penetration until 2021, and increase to over 28.2% penetration by 2025.
  
  
• In Asia-Pacific, Japan will be among the early adopter countries.

Read the press release.