Inside Digital TV articles from September 2001

Inside Digital TV archives from September 2001

Nokia delays UK DTT Media Terminal launch.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Nokia Home Communications has delayed the UK launch of its Media Terminal product until the first quarter of 2002 in order to concentrate on rolling it out to the German and Swedish markets this autumn, writes Barry Flynn. Nokia was...

Microsoft claims dirty tricks over Cabo.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Barry Flynn Editor Microsoft has strongly denied anonymous allegations that the TV Cabo digital cable service in Portugal, which is running one of the first implementations of Microsoft's Advanced TV platform, is facing serious teething...

Irish DTT boxes for UK.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Hugh Oram Ireland An Irish start-up company, NovaPal, plans to start making low-cost 'no frills' set-top boxes for the UK market and in the process, help speed the conversion of British TV viewers to digital. The company is based in Cork...

BSkyB takes stake in Tivo.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Chris Forrester London BSkyB has taken an undisclosed portion of a $51.75 million (E58.1 million) convertible equity stake in TiVo, the US-based PVR company. Sky holds a further option, which if exercised, means the company could end up...

OpenTV ready for MHP certificate.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Julian Clover Managing Editor US-based interactive middleware provider OpenTV claims to have become the first proprietary platform to make itself ready for MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) certification. It has developed an upgrade path in...

Storm over MTG DTT licences.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Goran Sellgren Stockholm Following the Modern Times Group (MTG's) decision to withdraw from Sweden's DTT platform, the Social Democrat government has instructed the Broadcasting Authority to start investigations into whether or not MTG's...

Canal+ slams DTT.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Sotires Eleftheriou Paris Denis Olivennes, Director-General of French pay-TV operator Canal+, has revealed he is deeply sceptical of French plans for DTT. In comments made at the Canal Satellite autumn press conference, he said that as a...

C+ and TPS discuss entente cordiale.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Sotires Eleftheriou Paris Canal+ and TPS have been sounding out a possible merger through the public prints. In an interview with Le Figaro, Denis Olivennes, Director-General of French pay-TV operator Canal+, had been asked about the...

New French interactive TV stats.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Sotires Eleftheriou Paris Television audience measurement company Mediametrie's latest survey of the viewing habits in French cable and satellite homes includes enhanced TV services (ie ones that do not need a return-path) for the first...

Editor's Note.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Erwan Launay, from France Telecom's R&D unit, has asked us to point out that our report on 'antenna diversity receivers' (Inside Digital TV Vol.4 No.14) omitted to mention the fact that most of the technical developments in this area were...

Spain's Aniel pushes MHP.(Asociacion Nacional de Industrias Electronicas)(y de Telecomunicaciones;)(multimedia home platform)(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... David del Valle Madrid ANIEL, Spain's electronic industry association, is attempting to persuade Spanish digital TV operators to adopt the MHP interactive middleware platform for their set-top-boxes. MHP, which has only just been fully...

TV Cabo beneficiary of DTT auction.(TV Cabo Interactive,)(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Nuno Cintra Torres Portugal By a narrow margin, the winner of the tender for the Portuguese DTT platform operator was not Oni Plataformas - as expected - but PTDP. Many observers saw in this outcome a hidden victory for TV Cabo, the...

Never mind the quality, feel the bandwidth.(video-on-demand)(Brief Article)(Column)(Statistical Data Included)
September 7, 2001... Barry Flynn looks at the feasibility of the Hollywood majors' 'video-on- demand' over the Web plans One of the risks of going away on holiday if you're a journalist is that the big story breaks while you're away. It certainly looked like...

Finland throws DTT switch.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Finland became the latest territory to launch a DTT platform at 15:00 on August 27, but with fewer new channels than originally planned - and no boxes in the shops. There were to have been eight new television channels across three...

Telekom cable sale.(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... Deutsche Telekom AG has announced that it has signed a contract for the sale of a further six of its nine regional cable TV companies to Liberty Media Corporation. Deutsche Telekom is selling to Liberty Media its entire interest in these six...

Briefly.(includes brief articles on Canal Satellite, ZDF and others)(Brief Article)
September 7, 2001... * Canal Satellite introduced a new channel numbering system in France at the end of August. Canal Satellite and approved free-to-air channels are numbered 1 to 199. Like the previous numbering scheme, the single digit channels go to Canal+...

Microsoft redraws digital video landscape.(critics say, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player provides near-DVD quality over Internet)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... In a stunning demonstration of the progress it has made in encoding video, Microsoft has shown it is capable of providing DVD quality at under 1Mbit/s over the Internet, writes Barry Flynn. Inside Digital TV was given convincing private...

DVB rejects 'MHP-Lite'.(digital video broadcasters reject new multimedia home platform standard)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barry Flynn Editor A DVB splinter group has failed in its attempt to have a stripped-down version of the MHP Internet access specification approved. The idea behind 'MHP-Lite' - as it has become known - is to reduce the cost of...

UPC Sweden ready for digital TV launch.(Swedish cable-TV group to transition to digital services in the Stockholm area)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Goran Sellgren Stockholm UPC has announced that its Swedish cable TV operations, which are concentrated in the greater Stockholm area and currently serve around 255,000 homes, will begin the long-awaited transition to digital services in...

Liberate 'launches' in Vienna.(UPC Telekabel starts up digital cable service with Liberate Technologies Inc. software)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barry Flynn Editor UPC Telekabel recently held a massive celebration in Vienna's main square to mark the launch of its new digital cable platform in Austria, which uses interactive TV software from Liberate. Part of the event involved the...

Kirch MHP d-box swap.(Kirch to change pay-per-view service to MHP standard instead of d-box technology)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barry Flynn IBC, Amsterdam In a surprise move, the Kirch Group, which runs Germany's dominant pay-TV service, Premiere World, has committed itself to the DVB MHP standard, and says it will now focus its interactive TV activities on...

MHP test-suites still not ready.(digital television multimedia home platform technology)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barry Flynn IBC, Amsterdam Despite the plethora of MHP-related products on view at IBC, one uncomfortable fact remains: the conformance procedure remains incomplete. According to Chem Assayag, new business development director at OpenTV...

Italian DTT rules ready soon.(digital terrestrial television)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Branislav Pekic Rome Italy's communications authority is expected to promulgate the rules for issuing licenses and authorisations for digital terrestrial TV by the end of this month. The move was confirmed by the regulator on September...

'Network PVR' for KIT?(Kingston Interactive Television planning new digital personal video recorder that connects to network)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barely is the PVR (Personal Video Recorder) out of the gate on both sides of the Atlantic, than a different model is being proposed - the 'network PVR' - and Kingston Interactive Television's (KIT's) commercial ADSL service seems a likely...

MHP authoring systems emerge.(digital television technology from Philips Digital Networks and Strategy and Technology)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barry Flynn IBC, Amsterdam Philips Digital Networks and UK MHEG specialists Strategy & Technology (S&T) were two of the companies demonstrating commercial MHP authoring systems at IBC - but at opposite ends of the scale. The most...

Philips stat-muxing breakthrough.(Philips Digital Networks claims breakthrough in statistical multiplexing)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Philips demonstrated what it claims is a 'breakthrough' in statistical multiplexing efficiency at IBC 2001, enabling 20 channels to be squeezed into a 40Mbit/s multiplex. Before, this would have taken 45Mbit/s. Inside Digital TV's observation...

Danish DTT delayed once again.(digital television)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Thomas Dodd Copenhagen Latest news from the ongoing politicking that eventually will lead to a decision about establishing Danish digital terrestrial television is that there's an indefinite delay in the process. A summit bringing...

Horizonte pulls out of DTT.(Horizonte Digital)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... David del Valle Madrid Horizonte Digital, a consortium led by publishing house Planeta and media group Godo, has abandoned its plans to apply for a Spanish DTT licence, arguing that DTT has slim prospects of success in Spain. Planeta,...

Auna names new Quiero team.(Auna Cable)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... David del Valle Madrid Telco holding company AUNA (owned by utilities Endesa and Union Fenosa, and telco Telecom Italia), which is the biggest Quiero shareholder with 49 per cent, has named the new management team for Spain's first DTT...

Windows on the future.(video encoding technology)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Barry Flynn considers the implications of the video encoding technology demonstrated by Microsoft at IBC. Some years ago, I had a long conversation about video encoding with an ITC engineer. I was trying to find out if there was an...

Sky awarded 'non-exclusive' licence.(British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC)(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... BSkyB has been awarded a 'non-exclusive local delivery service' licence allowing it to provide 'a range of multichannel television and related services by means of cable, broadband fixed wireless access or telephone networks' across the...

Investigation into Stream and Tele+ merger.(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... Italy's competition authority opened an investigation on September 12 into the proposed merger between pay-TV platforms Stream and Tele+, which is expected to create a new digital platform under the Tele+ brand-name. The authority argued that...

Briefly.(Brief Article)
September 21, 2001... * Via Digital is hoping to launch its new PVR box, which also runs OpenTV's Device Mosaic Web browser, 'pre-Christmas' - according to Via Digital personnel demonstrating the system on OpenTV's stand at IBC. However, they admitted they were...