TV Technology Intelligence

The battle for patents | 02 Feb 12 tags › The last 14 months have seen a surge in companies buying patent portfolios in the technology, media and telecoms industry. Starting in late 2010 with the purchase of 882 patents from Novell by a Microsoft-led consortium there have been almost $20bn of patent-related spend from just a handful of major IT and mobile companies. In early 2012 Intel entered the fray with a $120m purchase of 360 video-related patents from RealNetworks. But regulators may be about to respond to the constant sparing as the European Commission starts antitrust reviews over Samsung's mobile claims to prevent innovation from being stiffled.

Pay TV on connected TVs | 19 Jan 12 tags › CES 2012 saw a number of US operators announce soon-to-launch multiscreen services for internet-enabled TV sets (IETVs). These announcements signal pay-TV's renewed - and in many instances burgeoning - interest in the IETV, and also offer an excellent opportunity to examine the state of the IETV market more generally.

NDS prepares for IPO | 23 Dec 11 tags › NDS has filed for a $100m IPO, returning to being a publically listed company. The current company has benefited from several years of strong growth in the conditional access across the pay TV industry, and this round of funding could be used to bolster development in the rapidly changing market for multiscreen TV.

Quickflix launches on Samsung devices | 02 Feb 12 tags › Australian online video rental subscription company Quickflix is extending its streaming service WatchNow to Samsung IETVs, Blu-ray Disc (BD) players and the Galaxy line of Android tablets and smartphones....

Japan TV slump hits Toshiba | 01 Feb 12 tags › In its financial reports for the fourth quarter of 2011, Japanese company Toshiba posted a loss of ¥10.6bn ($138.7m; ?105.2m) amongst total revenues of ¥1.4tn ($18.3bn; ?13.8bn). The...

Hitachi to end TV manufacturing in Japan | 31 Jan 12 tags › Hitachi Ltd. plans to end in-house production of television sets in Japan. Both overcrowding in the market and strengthening of the yen have made it difficult for the company to compete in a low profit...

Set-tops, multiroom and home networking | 25 Jul 11 The set-top box market for pay TV operators is slowing down. Globally shipment growth, which was in double digits each year from 2003 until 2008, will now flatten in the low single digits. However, this belies a major new trend, the use of home networks to deliver advanced content services such as multiroom DVR and other extensions of multiscreen into the home. In this webinar, presented on the 14 October 2010 by Tom Morrod, head of TV Technology, we explore the trends around home networking, multiroom and multiscreen in the context of the set-top box industry, drawing upon the most recent research into this dynamic and rapidly evolving world and highlighting key facts and figures regarding the evolution of consumer premise equipment.

Understanding Multiscreen: How and Why Pay-TV is Extending Beyond the Set-Top Box | 17 Jun 11 Within the consumer electronics ecosystem, individuals have access to an unprecedented array of connectable, video-enabled devices. IP connectivity, coupled with video processing, has been extended to smart phones, tablets, gaming consoles, TV sets, Blu-ray players, standalone IP set-top boxes, and naturally, the PC. This webinar was presented on 16 June 2011 by analysts Merrick Kingston and Tom Morrod to explore IHS Screen Digest's ongoing research into why pay TV operators need to address this complex, evolving environment of video consumption on devices, and looking at how current deployments are starting to address the core issues surrounding multiscreen delivery.