Smart TV standard

LG, Philips and Sharp have agreed to work together to define common technical requirements for their Smart TVs, based upon open standards such as HTML5, CE-HTML and HbbTV. The group's first step will be to introduce the first beta version of a common Software Development Kit (SDK), which highlights the need to define the technical requirements that would allow content developers to create a single application that can run on Smart TVs from LG, Philips and Sharp Aquos Net+.

The beta version of the common SDK will be released in early October.

Home Video Business in H1 2011

Some facts according to a report compiled by DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group.

• For the six months that ended June 30, total consumer spending on home entertainment fell 5% from spending in the first half of 2010, to $8.34 billion from $8.78 billion.
  
• Disc sales were off 16.3% in the second quarter of 2011, to $1.8 billion from $2.15 billion, while electronic sellthrough was down 2.17%, to $129.75 million from $132.63 million in the second quarter of 2010.
  
• For the first half, consumers spent $4.2 billion on transactional video — disc rental, streaming and VOD — which is nearly 11% more than they spent in the first six months of 2010.
  
• Rental revenue fell 29% in the second quarter after dropping 26.9% in the first quarter, leaving total year-to-date spending as of June 30 at $896.5 million, down from $1.24 billion in the first six months of 2010.
  
• Subcription rental, chiefly from Netflix, rose 45.7% in the first six months of this year, to $1.56 billion from $1.07 billion in the first six months of 2010, although year-to-year numbers are somewhat skewed by the fact that for much of the period Netflix offered a combination disc-and-streaming package to its subscribers.

Source: Home Media Magazine.

Layar Vision

Layar Vision is an extension of the Layar platform, taking augmented reality to the next level by allowing the creation of layers and applications that recognize real world objects and display digital experiences on top of them.

Layar Vision uses computer vision techniques to augment objects in the physical world. It can tell which objects in the real world are augmented because the visual fingerprints of the objects are preloaded into the application based on the user’s layer selection.

MPEG LA found essential WebM patents

MPEG LA says 12 parties hold patents that its evaluators consider essential to the VP8 video codec by Google's WebM project. The disclosure came in a recent interview with StreamingMedia.com. MPEG LA says that, in response to their call for essential patents in February, a number of parties submitted patents for evaluation and twelve of those parties' patents have been examined and found to be essential to VP8.

Quoting MPEG LA from streamingmedia.com:

Thus far, 12 parties have been found to have patents essential to the VP8 standard. Generally, parties may submit patents for evaluation of essentiality to VP8 at any time during the process of facilitating a patent pool, and may continue to do so after the pool launches, assuming one is formed.

Once a pool license is created, it typically remains open for the inclusion of additional essential patents, and patent holders with essential patents are welcome to join the license as Licensors. MPEG LA met with VP8 essential patent holders in late June to facilitate a discussion among them whether and on what terms they may want to create a VP8 patent pool license and is continuing to facilitate that discussion.

Mozilla against WebP

In a bugzilla entry asking for the incorporation of WebP, Mozilla developer Joe Drew said in a comment "As the WebP image format exists currently, I won't accept a patch for it". Readers were directed to a blog posting by Jeff Muizelaar for the rationale for the rejection. He explained that Mozilla is unhappy with the quality versus size claims made by Google for WebP and questioned the methodology used to test: this converted existing JPEG images into WebP images and then compared quality using PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and file size.

A month after Muizelaar made these comments, Google released a new study which used PNG images as source and compared quality using SSIM (Structural Similarity). This new study showed WebP images to be on average 25%-34% smaller than similar quality JPEGs, but the quality value is calculated and there is some discussion over whether WebP imagery is perceived by the untrained eye to be of the same quality.

Source: H online.

Real-time entertainment traffic

The last report by Sandvine says that -in North America- Netflix accounts for 30% of traffic during prime time, and 22.2% of daily internet traffic. Sandvine gets the data from ISPs using its broadband technology and now foresees "Real-Time Entertainment" (which includes Netflix) shooting up over 55% of peak internet traffic by the end of this year.

Sandive also reported that in Europe, Real-Time Entertainment continues a steady climb, rising to 33.2% of peak aggregate traffic, up from 31.9% last fall. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol, is the largest single component of both upstream (59.7%) and downstream (21.6%) Internet traffic during peak periods. In the UK, BBC's iPlayer is 6.6% of peak downstream traffic, reflecting the demand for localized content in many markets. Overall, individual subscribers in Europe consume twice the amount of data as North Americans. 

Source: Engadget.

Microsoft to acquire Skype

Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy Internet phone company Skype Technologies SA for $8.5 billion in cash — the most aggressive move yet by Microsoft to play in the increasingly converged worlds of communication, information and entertainment. The deal will let Microsoft "be more ambitious, do more things," Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in an interview.

Skype will become a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype Chief Executive Mr. Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division, reporting directly to Mr. Ballmer.

The Skype deal ranks as the biggest acquisition in the 36-year history of Microsoft, a company that traditionally has shied away from large deals. In 2007, Microsoft paid approximately $6 billion to acquire online advertising firm aQuantive Inc. Many current and former Microsoft executives believe Microsoft significantly overpaid for that deal. But they are also relieved that Microsoft gave up on an unsolicited $48 billion offer for Yahoo Inc. nearly three years ago. Yahoo is valued at half that sum today. 

 

Source: Wall Street Journal.

Texas Instruments to acquire National Semiconductor

Texas Instruments Inc. signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire National Semiconductor Corp. for $6.5 billion in cash, the company said Monday April 4. 

The deal, which remains subject to regulatory review and the approval of National's shareholders, would bring together two of the longest-running semiconductor companies and two of the largest vendors of analog chips. 

TI ranked No. 4 in the world in overall semiconductor sales in 2010 with revenue of $11.9 billion. The addition of National's revenue would have made TI the No. 3 chip vendor in 2010, ahead of Toshiba and trailing only Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., according to Gartner. National had revenue of $1.42 billion in its fiscal 2010.