Today’s news – that the BBC’s iPlayer, its market-shaping catch-up service, will now be available on TV to subscribers of Sky – is not without irony, given the steady stream of anti-BBC spin we’ve heard from the pay-TV operator (and its newspaper siblings) over the years. Neutral observers of the two UK media giants are more used to seeing them slug it out, like Waldorf and Stadtler, only without the affection.
Sky, the UK TV broadcaster and ISP has announced that it is adding a fibre broadband product to its internet packages, while also for the first time offering an á la carte internet TV service to compete with UK newcomer Netflix.
Sky’s fibre service, based on the UK incumbent BT’s wholesale network, will offer download speed of 40Mb at a cost of £20 a month, undercutting BT. Sky said that the fibre package would be available to 30 per cent of UK homes, and that this would increase in line with BT’s fibre rollout.
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Informa has long believed that the winning video platform will be the one that most conveniently blends a mix of Live TV and OTT into one easy-to-use package for consumers. Conventional logic has always been that this would either come from one of four places: a Pay TV provider, one of the big CE OEMs, Apple or Google. These players are the ones with the clout required to both secure content deals, and to pull off the significant technical integration such a play would require. But at CES, the most compelling vision of this future came from a much more unlikely source: Boxee.
Content is king: the most over-used, hackneyed and clichéd phrase in this industry? Probably. The biggest truth in said industry? Absolutely.
Google has announced new hardware manufacturers that have joined it as partners for its IPTV service Google TV. LG is the biggest name to join the Google TV ecosystem this year and will unveil a new line of Google TV sets running on its own L9 chipset at CES in Las Vegas next week.
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TV According to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media, awareness of Smart TVs remains low as UK retailers fail to educate consumers of their benefits and provide even the most basic information regarding connected-TV features. Informa estimates that 35 per cent of all TVs sold this year will be “smart”, however, this is a result of internet connectivity becoming a “default” technology in more and more TV sets as standard, rather than an increase in consumer demand.
As 2011 draws to a close, Telecoms.com takes a look forward at 2012 to see what to expect from the industry during the year ahead.
A report from US firm Pyramid Research which details its expectations for the telecoms market in 2012 predicts that managed-network IPTV services will be in one per cent of households worldwide next year.
US satellite pay TV broadcaster Dish networks has applied for the trademark ‘Ollo’ as a brand name for its planned wireless LTE-Advanced based services.
We speak to Wesley Ng, principal designer of the Stargazr IPTV user interface from Hong Kong telco PCCW Media, which won the category “Broadband Home: Appliances, Devices, Home Networks & Services” at this year’s Broadband InfoVision Awards.
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