Inside Digital TV articles from March 2003

Inside Digital TV archives from March 2003

PlayJam Poised For US Debut.
March 5, 2003... Mark Holmes Senior Editor OpenTV's games unit, Static2358, hopes to launch chat services on its leading games channel, PlayJam, in the second quarter of 2003. The move is aimed at further enhancing the offering on PlayJam, which has so far...

Freeview: 560,000 New Units Shipped.(digital television product )
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor Consumer electronics manufacturer Thomson has revealed that the total number of digital terrestrial television decoders that have been shipped to UK retailers between August 2002 and January 2003 amounts to 560,000...

Freeview Faces Upgrade Problems.(Digital television recievers )(Brief Article)
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor Many owners of decoders designed to receive the UK DTT Freeview service are not receiving the software they need to fix bugs in their boxes or upgrade them, Inside Digital TV has learnt. The issue arises because too...

iSeeTV For Indiana.(Media Logic contract )
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor Media Logic, the UK-based interactive TV company that created the groundbreaking iSeeTV application (Inside Digital TV Vol.5 No.24), has gained its first foothold in the US market through a deal to provide healthcare to...

DTT/DVD Combis Multiply.(electronics industry product )(Brief Article)
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor One of the interesting features of the UK's new "horizontal" DTT market is that manufacturers of Freeview receivers are increasingly creating "combination" or "combi" units - in which the DTT decoder is integrated with a...

Slow Path To Analogue Switchoff.(television viewing research )(Brief Article)
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor A new report from research company Strategy Analytics suggests that 597 million homes worldwide used analogue terrestrial broadcasting as their primary TV service in 2002. And although the rollout of digital TV is...

New VOD Study Predicts More Demand.(Video-on-demand )
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor A joint report by research firm NPA Conseil and the SatelliFax daily media news service is predicting that by 2007 there will be between 450,000 and 800,000 subscribers to video-on-demand (VOD) services through ADSL in...

com hem Considers Price Increases In Sweden.(Com Hem AB )
March 5, 2003... Mark Holmes senior editor com hem, the Swedish cable TV operator, will have its work cut out trying to increase ARPUs in the Swedish pay-TV market during 2003. The operator believes growth in the market will be very slow, and that the only...

DTV: A Horizontal Market Beckons.(digital television)
March 5, 2003... Barry Flynn ponders on the collapse of Europe's vertically integrated pay-TV model Within a matter of weeks, two of the giants of the European digital TV technology sector have been sold off: Canal+ Technologies' acquisition by Thomson...

Briefly.(multiple topics)
March 5, 2003... * New plans to give UK consumers better advice on buying integrated digital TVs (iDTVs) have been announced by e-commerce minister Stephen Timms. Mr Timms announced the proposals in response to the results of the Government's consultation on...

Room For More At 28 degrees E.(there is room for another 76 digital channels on the Astra 2D satellite)
March 19, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor According to Inside Digital TV's analysis, there is currently room for another 76 digital channels on the Astra 2D satellite, which the BBC declared last week as the destination for its unencrypted services. This implies...

TV Cabo Continues To Dominate In Portugal.(TV Cabo reports its revenues for 2002)
March 19, 2003... Mark Holmes senior editor TV Cabo, the largest pay-TV operator in Portugal, saw its revenues grow by over 30 per cent in 2002. The operator ended the year with over 1.3 million pay-TV customers and a market share of over 80 per cent. These...

Industry Leaders Discuss Possible News Corp Impact in the US.
March 19, 2003... Mark Holmes senior editor On a panel discussing interactive services at Satellite 2003, most experts believe Rupert Murdoch's News Corp could have a profound impact in the US digital television market if it were to negotiate a deal for...

MHP Goes Global.(ATSC in the U.S. will likely incorporate parts of the Multimedia Home Platform standard )
March 19, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor In a move that could create a global "write-once-run-anywhere" interactive TV environment, US digital terrestrial TV standards body ATSC is poised to incorporate elements of the European Java-based MHP (Multimedia Home...

The Future's H.264.(DVB-AVC expects to involved broadcast-quality video using H.264/ABC coding running at 1.2 Mbit/s by 2005)
March 19, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor Ken McCann, chairman of the DVB-AVC (Audio Visual Content) group, has seen the future of digital TV and predicts it will involve broadcast-quality video using H.264/AVC coding running at 1.2 Mbit/s by 2005. ...

German ISP Pioneers TV Approach.(T-Online launches the 'T-Online Vision TV' service for users in Germany)
March 19, 2003... Mark Holmes senior editor T-Online, one of Europe's leading ISPs, has unveiled "T-Online Vision on TV," a service that will enable users in Germany to access Internet services which have previously only be available to PC or mobile...

Making Money From iDTV.(interactive digital television)
March 19, 2003... Hellen K. Omwando, Analyst, Forrester Research To find out if there is a revenue-generating silver bullet for European iDTV (interactive digital TV), Forrester analyzed the revenue-generating potential of six iDTV apps, using three key...

All Aboard For Astra 2D.(the BBC moves from BSkyB to the Astra 2D satellite)
March 19, 2003... Barry Flynn Editor When the BBC issued its announcement last week that it was quitting the Sky Digital platform, the decision wasn't presented as a negotiable one. "... From 30 May [the BBC] will, for the first time, broadcast its eight TV...

Briefly.(digital television news briefs)
March 19, 2003... * European digital TV standards body DVB has announced two new transmission standards, DVB-X and DVB-S2. The latter represents a new hybrid transmission standard aimed at battery-operated mobile receivers, and combines the DVB-T terrestrial...