Broadband ISPs

Iliad buys Alice, Free grows VOD sales

Dan O'Shea — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:34:23 -0400

French broadband service provider Iliad, which already runs the Free IPTV service, has finalized a deal to buy Telecom Italia's Alice France unit for slightly more than $1.1 billion. News of the deal has been circulating for month, as Telecom Italia has been trying to streamline and reduce costs, while Iliad was trying to beef up in the competitive broadband market in France.

Meanwhile, Iliad's Free ISP unit said demand for its Freebox TV IPTV video-on-demand offering had surged this year, with sales of nearly 2.9 million VOD titles in the first half. Subscriber usage of VOD has tripled in the last two years, the company said.

For more:
- see this Dow Jones Newswires post at Easy Bourse
- check out this story at IPTV News

Related articles:
Iliad made a move on Alice earlier this year. Iliad report
European IPTV providers have been seeing strong growth. European IPTV report

Iliad makes of move on Alice, with TI's blessing

Dan O'Shea — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:11:32 -0400

French broadband service provider Iliad is engaging in exclusive negotiations to acquire Telecom Italia's French network business, Liberty Surf Group SAS, aslo known as Alice France, for about $1.3 billion. Telecom Italia's is in the midst of a restructuring and recovery process, so the negtiations do not come as much of a surprise, though TI reportedly had been looking to sell for a while and had drawn interest from a number of parties.

The acquisition would give Iliad, which operates the Freebox TV service in the tightly-competitive French market, a larger base of new potential TV customers. Iliad currently is considered the third-ranked broadband service provider in France behind France Telecom and Neuf Cegetel.

For more:
- read this story at Light Reading

Related articles:
IPTV players worth watching IPTV report
Telecom Italia also is facing more IPTV competition back home. Telecom Italia report

Sezmi aims to redefine TV service models

Tue, 06 May 2008 06:59:50 -0400

For those of you who heard about Sezmi Corp. while walking around the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas last month, and didn't recognize the name, the company is actually video wholesaler Building B re-launched as an online video/broadcast/IPTV aggregator of sorts. After announcing initial partnerships with Sun Microsystems and Harris at NAB, Sezmi is now talking about further details of its FlexCast video distribution system. FlexCast leverages existing digital TV spectrum and home broadband connections such as DSL to deliver content to a Sezmi receiver, which also collects digital TV content, local broadcast content and other Internet-based content, stores all that content, and presents to users in organized, recommendation-based menus.

Some observers are calling Sezmi's approach confusing, while also calling it a competitive threat to cable TV and satellite TV companies. However, it is also a challenge to the strategies telcos have used to deploy IPTV, relying more on existing broadband conduits than new fiber investment. Sezmi also is trying to provide an answer to one of the key questions that next-generation TV service providers continue to struggle with-how to collect, maintain and present video content from as many sources as possible. It's now up to broadband service providers who haven't yet committed to massive TV investments to decide if it's the right answer.

For more:
- read this story at Telephony

Related article:
- Sezmi predecessor Building B initially launched last summer. Sezmi report

NAB: Will online TV movement hurt IPTV?

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:59:40 -0400

The National Association of Broadcasters trade show last week in Las Vegas appeared from some press coverage to be more of a telco IPTV meet-up. While there was plenty of positive chatter, there was also some caution. One bit of caution had to do with the growing trend of TV programming moving online--and being viewed online during prime TV viewing hours. Online video aggregation company Veoh Networks said it is seeing that trend, but even a firm from the telecom world, Motorola, noted the increasing impact that online video viewing could have on telcos' IPTV hopes. Of particular threat is the increasing amount of free TV content online from TV broadcasters themselves.

For more:
- read this story in Light Reading

Related articles:
- NAB was a place for telcos to work on content relationships. NAB report
- Content deals blooming everywhere. IPTV content report

ESPN expands online

Tom Burton — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:59:50 -0500

No one could accuse U.S. broadcasters of rushing to the Internet. Slowly but surely the big media brands are putting content packages on web-based channels, but with emphasis on the slowly. Disney-controlled sports giant ESPN is the latest, opening its sports portal, ESPN360.com to non-cable subscribers who have a .edu or .mil network.

ESPN relaunched its video site in September for subscribers of its cable service where the cable company has paid the required affiliate fee and plans to have 2,500 hours of live content this year. That gives the service a footprint of about 20 million users and the move to make it available to the two new domain groups is because ESPN says they can't get it though a cable provider.

On that rationale, the service should be made available to any region in the world which does not get ESPN. So why limit the service to the same old media footprint? HBO is doing something similar in its Wisconsin trial and is a replay of the early thinking when newspapers made their first tentative move online over a decade ago. Once the newspaper groups understood the online audience was almost all additional to their traditional audience the newspaper companies (mostly) embraced the net as a new channel and the big sites are now earning very good money from their ad-supported digital content. For the TV industry it has been a far more painful process, but with brands like National Geographic also starting to put their video content online, it does seem 2008 might just be the year we finally see most of the big players get onto the web.

For more:
- ESPN to offer sports events free to some web users Article
- National Geographic Channel beefs up broadband Article

Related articles:
HBO makes online video hard Report
Time Warner needs a visionary Report
Motorola says 45% of Europeans watch TV online Report

Indian IPTV service starts in Q4

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 06:59:10 -0400

India's largest private telco, Airtel, plans to launch an IPTV-ready network later this year in five cities.

The network will run at 8mbps and follows a successful trial of a 1,000 homes. Airtel has chosen Israeli firm Optibase's IPTV encoding platforms for its planned IPTV service offerings. Optibase has also installed video over IP solutions for other major Indian service providers like Aksh Optifibre Ltd., and Time Broadband Services Pvt Ltd. The Israeli advanced digital video service provider's carrier grade TV streaming platforms, incorporated in UTStarcom IP-based end-to-end networking solution, will be utilized by Bharti Airtel to supply high-quality H.264 video, it said.

For More:
- Airtel launches 8 Mbps broadband web-access
- New Service uses Israeli platform

Related Articles:
Indian telco bullish on IPTV
Juniper looks to India as next IPTV hotbed
Indian IPTV operators face language barriers

So many streamers, so little bandwidth

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:59:50 -0400

A pair of reports from Cisco and ABI Research are fueling speculation that broadband video sites are going to choke off the Internet. Cisco, the Silicon Valley backbone player said peer-to-peer and video distribution could double 'Net traffic within a couple of years, according to coverage by Jim Duffy with IDG News Service. He reports that Cisco sees video and consumer traffic surpassing business traffic by next year, and driving a 5X increase in traffic between 2006 and 2011.

Mike Wolf, research director with ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y., wrote about how Joost and BitTorrent are cozying up to consumer electronics makers to get their software into hardware. For Joost, he says, "They see the TV as the ultimate destination for their content, and they know that the only way to get there is through attaching themselves to different boxes that reside in the living room."

It may not be a cakewalk, he notes, because some broadband providers are "actively throttling the bandwidth allocated to these services. Limiting bandwidth could be crippling to a service such as Joost, and consumer electronics vendors may cringe at the thought of any promised services being hobbled."

The reports will no doubt stir the network neutrality pot again, giving ammunition to broadband providers who say they need to create speed tiers to manage Web traffic. A similar phenomenon is afoot in Europe, where providers are talking about charging the BBC for its online video-on-demand portal, the iPlayer. More on that below.

For More:
- Jim Duffy's coverage appears in ComputerWorld here
- Matt Chapman of Australia's iTnews provides a summary here

BigBand demos IPTV delivery technology for cable

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:59:20 -0400

BigBand Networks, the digital video platform provider in Redwood City, Calif., reported that it's demonstrating switched digital video capability at the CableLabs conference this week in Keystone, Colo. SDV will enable legacy cable plants to deliver video the way IPTV does--one channel at a time.

Most cable systems currently transmit all channels in a given tier to the set-top box in subscribers' homes, which is why the industry sunk so much money into infrastructure during the '90s. Many cable pipes around the country have 500 to 750 MHz capacity, enough to simultaneously carry 83 to 125 uncompressed hi-def broadcast channels. With SDV, only the channel being viewed is delivered to the set-top, freeing up the remaining capacity.

A robust SDV cable plant could easily compete with a telco fiber system's broadband offering, and cable operators are moving to implement SDV. Time Warner Cable transitioned its Austin, Texas system to SDV last year using BigBand servers, according to several reports. BigBand won a technical Emmy with TWC in January for a technology that allows subscribers to jump to the start of a program in progress without needing a recording device.

BigBand meanwhile posted second quarter earnings last week of $1.7 million on revenues of $54.5 million, up from a loss of nearly $600,000 on revenues of $38 million during the same period a year ago.

For more:
- BigBand details its participation at the CableLabs event here
- BigBand's second quarter results are here
- Multichannel News covers TWC's switched digital Austin operation here

SPOTLIGHT: U.K.'s Freedom2Surf to offer Internet TV

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:00:40 -0400

U.K. broadband ISP Freedom2Surf has inked a deal with Aggregator, a pay-TV platform that makes use of PCs and hybrid set-top boxes, to offer Internet TV. Aggregator typically specializes in offering niche content to underserved segments. Article

News Corp. + WiMAX = IPTV?

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:01:30 -0400

News Corp. and its majority-owned DirecTV business are reportedly embarking on an ambitious plan to set up a nationwide WiMAX network in the U.S. through strategic partners. And one likely scenario involves Clearwire, Craig McCaw's wireless broadband company that recently raked in $900 million from Intel and Motorola to deploy WiMAX nationwide. Sources say News Corp. and DirecTV are in advanced talks with Clearwire for a project that could take at least two years and $2 billion to provide News Corp. and DirecTV with a valuable wireless interactive broadband loop the companies can use to sell content, goods, advertising and services directly to consumers.

Talk about a significantly better business case for WiMAX and for Clearwire, which is positioning itself as just another broadband service provider. With its valuable MySpace property, News Corp. has been rumored for some time to be interested in WiMAX, with some thinking it might build its own network or bid in the upcoming advanced wireless services auction. While the unidirectional problem for satellite TV operators has been discussed in the past, the WiMAX solution results in an IPTV play, and a wireless one at that. Any thoughts on this?

Stay tuned to FierceIPTV for updates, and for more:
- see this report from The Hollywood Reporter