IPTV subscriptions in Western Europe soared last year despite the economic downturn, with 45% growth between December 2007 and December 2008.
Of all the European markets, France had the widest adoption of IPTV with growth of 23% year on year to 5.7 million, more than half of all subscribers in Western Europe (10.3 millions total).
There have been a couple of IPTV service closures. Volny IPTV in the Czech Republic and Tiscali IPTV in Italy have both closed TV operations recently. Both failed to grow in the face of strong competition in their respective markets. But these examples are very much exceptions to an overall picture of steady growth in most markets.
The figures come from a report written by analysts Point Topic for the Broadband TV forum.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
BBC launches mobile live TV beta
The BBC has debuted its 24-hour live television streaming website for mobile devices. The service currently has eight channels, including five general news streams, one BBC Parliament stream, and CBBC and CBeebies children's programming.
The video displays at 176 x 144 pixels on WiFi-enabled devices. The service will not work over-the-air, and it is only available for U.K. residents. Users can see the streaming video service by visiting http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/live/tv/.
The news organization has also launched its BBC Mobile homepage, which gives users customization options such as a WAP version, the choice of more images and graphics, or the full-desktop version of the website. Users can view the news site at bbc.co.uk/mobile.
Source: MobileBurn.
ITU-T on Distributed Computing
ITU-T has just released a new Technology Watch report which examines "Distributed Computing: Utilities, Grids and Clouds".
Expanding communication networks, combined with the growth of affordable broadband in developed countries, has enabled organizations to share their computational resources. What originally started as grid computing, temporarily using remote supercomputers or clusters of mainframes to address scientific problems too large or too complex to be solved on in-house infrastructures, has evolved into service-oriented business models that offer physical and virtual resources on a pay as you go basis – as an alternative to often idle, in-house data centers and stringent license agreements.
The report describes the advent of these new forms of distributed computing, notably grid and cloud computing, the applications that they enable, and their potential impact on future standardization.
"Distributed Computing: Utilities, Grids and Clouds" is freely available to download at http://www.itu.int/oth/T2301000009/en.
Expanding communication networks, combined with the growth of affordable broadband in developed countries, has enabled organizations to share their computational resources. What originally started as grid computing, temporarily using remote supercomputers or clusters of mainframes to address scientific problems too large or too complex to be solved on in-house infrastructures, has evolved into service-oriented business models that offer physical and virtual resources on a pay as you go basis – as an alternative to often idle, in-house data centers and stringent license agreements.
The report describes the advent of these new forms of distributed computing, notably grid and cloud computing, the applications that they enable, and their potential impact on future standardization.
"Distributed Computing: Utilities, Grids and Clouds" is freely available to download at http://www.itu.int/oth/T2301000009/en.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Philips 3D Solutions discontinued
As reported by Display Daily, executives in Philips corporate offices have decided to stop operations at Philips 3D Solutions, an incubator business it has been funding for some time.
CEO Jos Swillens declared "Philips has been marketing its leading no-glasses based 3D technologies through a pro-active approach for a long time, because it believes that over time, no-glasses based 3D TVs will bring the ultimate 3D experience to the home. Unfortunately, the current market developments no longer justify such a pro-active approach. As a consequence of this, Philips has decided to scale down its investments in this area. In practice, this means that the 3D Solutions venture will be discontinued".
However, since the 3D Solutions group was not part of Philips Consumer Lifestyle group, which is responsible for consumer TVs, this group is still free to evaluate 3D technologies for use by Philips.
CEO Jos Swillens declared "Philips has been marketing its leading no-glasses based 3D technologies through a pro-active approach for a long time, because it believes that over time, no-glasses based 3D TVs will bring the ultimate 3D experience to the home. Unfortunately, the current market developments no longer justify such a pro-active approach. As a consequence of this, Philips has decided to scale down its investments in this area. In practice, this means that the 3D Solutions venture will be discontinued".
However, since the 3D Solutions group was not part of Philips Consumer Lifestyle group, which is responsible for consumer TVs, this group is still free to evaluate 3D technologies for use by Philips.
Friday, April 3, 2009
ESA conducting studies on SVC
The Telecommunications and Integrated Applications (TIA) directorate of the European Space Agency (ESA) is conducting a 12-months study on “Scalable Video Coding Applications and Technologies for mobile satellite based hybrid networks”.
The activity shall investigate the viability of integrating Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technologies over DVB-SH networks and disseminate its findings to relevant fora (e.g. DVB TM–SSP, DVB TM–CBMS, or DVB TM–AVC). Partners of the project are Nomor Research GmbH, Fraunhofer HHI, Fraunhofer IIS and Eutelsat S.A.
The activity shall investigate the viability of integrating Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technologies over DVB-SH networks and disseminate its findings to relevant fora (e.g. DVB TM–SSP, DVB TM–CBMS, or DVB TM–AVC). Partners of the project are Nomor Research GmbH, Fraunhofer HHI, Fraunhofer IIS and Eutelsat S.A.
The individual study objectives may be summarized as follows:
- To gain insight on the benefits of state-of-the-art Scalable Video Coding (SVC), in a Mobile TV context,
- To analyze the DVB-SH specifications with regards to supporting SVC,
- To provide methods for estimating the gains offered by SVC with respect to H.264/AVC,
- To verify these methods by way of system simulations (to be set-up in the study) of selected DVB-SH use cases (to be identified in the study),
- To benchmark DVB-SH against other bearer technologies for Mobile TV that exploit SVC-based or non-SVC-based scalable video coding schemes, using public descriptions/results available for these other bearer technologies,
- If necessary, to influence the SVC standardisation process in DVB (TM-AVC), in coordination with other stakeholders within and outside TM-SSP,
- To provide recommendation for future work, using the tools developed.
eInfochips launches SVC codec for TI DSP
eInfochips, Inc., a leading IP driven product development services company, has extended its offerings in the video domain by introducing two high definition (HD) video codecs targeted for the entire embedded video design market.
The codecs, which run on Texas Instruments (TI) digital media processors based on DaVinci (TM) technology, support encode of live HD video up to 1080p and includes H.264 Base-Profile AVC (Advanced Video Codec) and H.264 SVC (Scalable Video Codec).
The H.264 AVC is currently available from eInfochips as a highly optimized DSP-Library based on TI's digital video evaluation module (DVEVM) and eInfochips' DVPB-HD Board. The H.264 SVC is currently available as an optimized C-Library, and will be available as an optimized DSP-Library startingMay 2009 .
Read the full story.
The codecs, which run on Texas Instruments (TI) digital media processors based on DaVinci (TM) technology, support encode of live HD video up to 1080p and includes H.264 Base-Profile AVC (Advanced Video Codec) and H.264 SVC (Scalable Video Codec).
The H.264 AVC is currently available from eInfochips as a highly optimized DSP-Library based on TI's digital video evaluation module (DVEVM) and eInfochips' DVPB-HD Board. The H.264 SVC is currently available as an optimized C-Library, and will be available as an optimized DSP-Library starting
Read the full story.
ATSC considering SVC for mobile DTV
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC - the North-American equivalent of the European DVB) is currently considering Scalable Video Coding (SVC) as a candidate standard for mobile digital television.
More details on Christian Timmerer's blog on Multimedia Communication.
More details on Christian Timmerer's blog on Multimedia Communication.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Hitachi unveils 3D mobile phone
Japanese cell phone manufacturer KDDI has teamed up with Hitachi for the new WOOO Ketai H001 phone, whose main feature is the display enabling 3D visualization for photos and video playback. Ketai H001’s LCD has a 3 inch diagonal, uses the IPS Technology and supports a 854 x 480 resolution. Pricing has not been announced but the handset is due to hit the Asian market this spring.You can find totally incomprehensible (at least for me) japanese information here.
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