News US:

Ontario - - -    IPTV Integrated Solutions, Ontario -- Digital Rapids – a leading developer of scalable solutions for content ingest, encoding, transcoding, protection and delivery – has released version 2.3 software for the StreamZ CP family of professional content encoding solutions with integrated digital video watermarking. This new version significantly expands the systems’ forensic watermarking capabilities.
Enhancements to the watermarking functions in StreamZ CP 2.3 include:

• Watermarking can be applied during both transcoding and live encoding.
• Up to five separate watermarking keys can be layered in a single real-time pass, ideal when there are multiple levels of content stakeholders each requiring distinct identification.
• An integrated ticketing database enables tracking of used watermarking keys against user-specified properties and data for easy identification.

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News UK/US:

MobiTV raises further $30m   MobiTV, the US-headquartered mobile television aggregator and service provider, has raised a further $30m in funding and won two new investors, Adobe Systems and Hearst Corporation. The additional funding takes the total funding round to more than $100m following the raising of $70m in July.
MobiTV whose principal investors also include Oak Investment Partners, Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Gefinor Ventures said it would use the funds to support continued growth as it rolls out mobile television services around the world, and invests in new distribution technologies including Wi-Max.

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News G:

Berlin, Brandenburg - - -    Within the "European Forum for Mobile TV" nearest future strategies, business cases, technical and juristical conditions are in the focus of discussion.
Actual and future development perspectives in the Mobile TV business will be discussed by high-ranked decision makers and company holders out of 10 different European countries.
The program offers apart from discussion opportunities related to juristical and "regulation" aspects also debates about technological development, usable business and added-value models as well as the user expectations.
This forum event starts at the 31st August until 1st September within the "Medienwoche Berlin-Brandenburg" at the ESMT-Campus (the former "Staatsratsgebäude") at the Schlossplatz in Berlin-Mitte.

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News G:

Duesseldorf, Cologne - - -    The German Mobile TV provider MFD (Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland GmbH) is going to start with "Handy-TV" based on DMB (Digital-Multimedia-Pilotprojekt in Regensburg) at 31st of May 2006.
The marketing startegy is based on a cooperation with "debitel". Initially but against their primarily objectives the mobile broadcast will be placed in five German cities: Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich. Plans for enlargement the coverage exist.
With the marketing start the the exact prizes for the service utilisation will be announced. Already at the CeBIT press conference a pay scale of approx 10 Euro per month for the complete program has been notified. These figures are in the same range like Vodafone and their UMTS streaming.
The DMB package of MFD offers TV programs like ZDF, N24, MTV and ProSiebenSat.1
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News NO:

Oslo - - - Norwegians try out TV on mobiles
Mobile users in Norway can now watch TV on their phones, courtesy of the public broadcaster NRK.
The service from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation allows people to watch television on their mobiles 24 hours a day. Alongside the live streaming, people can pick more specialised content such as a news bulletin every hour and a Top Gear style motoring show. NRK expects the content to become more tailored as the market picks up.
Increasing popularity For the moment it simply testing whether consumers will want and use TV on their phones. So far the feedback has been encouraging. In the first eight hours of launching, 2,000 clips were downloaded," said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, a spokesman for NRK.
He expects the service to become more popular as video phones become more common. "Usage will go up and up. Mobile networks are getting faster and better and by next year 80% of handsets will have a media player," he told BBC News Online. The technology behind the video content has been developed by Norwegian firm RubberDuck Media Lab.
The service supports 3GP, which is one of the standards for mobile TV. This means that users do not have to download a media player on to their phones and it will also work on all networks.
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News LU:

Luxembourg -- April 13, 2006--
Dan Goldberg joins Executive Committee of SES Global CEO of New Skies Satellites to further strengthen SES Executive team. SES Global S.A., the world's pre-eminent satellite operator, is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Daniel S. Goldberg to the Executive Committee of SES, reporting to Mr. Romain Bausch, President and CEO of SES Global. In addition to his new functions as a Member of the Executive Committee of SES Global, Mr. Goldberg will continue to lead New Skies Satellites in the position of President and CEO. His appointment to the Executive Committee of SES follows the successful completion of the acquisition of New Skies Satellites by SES Global as announced on March 30th, 2006.
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News China:
CCTV Launches China's First HDTV Service with Television MPEG-2 Encoding System (Business Wire)
BEIJING SOUTHAMPTON, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 2006--TANDBERG Television (OSE:TAT) announced today that it is providing the professional video compression systems to enable China's first national high definition (HD) TV roll-out. The new HDTV service is being deployed to provide a state-of-the-art television infrastructure for China and to ensure that millions of people in China have access to superior HD content. The HD service, the first of its kind in China, features movies, TV series, documentaries and 3-dimensional animated pictures.

HD is the immediate future for Chinese broadcasting, with the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing already being hailed as the 'High Definition Games'. Additionally, the Chinese government has set a deadline of 2015 for the culmination of the country's mass migration to digital TV and the nationwide switch-off of analog broadcasting. NDT, partner of the country's largest broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), selected TANDBERG Television to provide an MPEG-2 head-end system which it has been trialling over the past six months. Following these successful trials, the service is now being rolled out nationally and is already being used by CCTV to provide HDTV to multiple digital cable head-ends across China. The HD video delivery system is based on the superior bandwidth-reducing capabilities of the TANDBERG E5780 MPEG-2 HD encoder, which has field-proven capabilities in large-scale deployments.
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News FR:

Paris -- April 13, 2006--
DVB-T - 70% of the households in 2007. The French Media Council Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA) informed the French premier Jacques Chirac about the expectations in 2007. It is expected that 70% of the French households will be able to receive DVB-T.
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News US:

MONTEREY, Calif. --(BUSINESS WIRE)-- March 21, 2006--
Combined commercial market value (backhaul, retail contracts) for streaming audio, video, streaming advertising and download entertainment media generated close to $450 million in 2005.
Content distribution networks (CDNs) grew their total revenue base (streaming and non-streaming accounts) by an average of 41.2%, according to the latest report published by AccuStream iMedia Research. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) averaged over $8,200 for the year.
The report, CDN Market Dynamics, Analysis and Share: 2005 - 2006 includes provisioning analysis for retail contracts delivered through stand-alone CDN providers, as well as self-hosting networks such as AOL, Yahoo and Google.
The entire CDN and streaming bandwidth services market is poised to grow by over 30% in 2006.
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News East:

DISCOP 2006, 22 to 24 June 2006 at the SOFITEL ATRIUM HOTEL, Budapest

• DISCOP is targeted at distribution, programming, acquisitions, production and advertising executives involved in Central & Eastern Europe fast-changing television, cable, satellite, broadband, DVD and triple-play marketplaces

• DISCOP is centred around the online pre-organization of qualified meetings between BUYERS and SELLERS of television content, formats, thematic channels and Interactive programming.

• Attending DISCOP as a BUYER is 75% less expansive than at attending any other international market - on the basis of 2 company representatives staying 3 days and 3 nights in Budapest.

• 100% al all international SELLERS involved in Central & Eastern Europe attend DISCOP.

• The DISCOP CAMPUS presentations program which runs parallel to the DISCOP 3-day market highlights the individuals and companies behind unique business models fuelling the convergence between the worlds of television, the Internet and mobile communications - final programme to be ready by 28 April.

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News Ge :

IPTV brings together German Telekom and Microsoft.
Telekom Germany and Microsoft have agreed for cooperation concerning the market introduction of TV-Services via VDSL. The corporate group announced on Tuesday to provide in the nearer future TV via VDSL and in addition to this supplementary interactive services regarding the area of comprehensive Entertainment services.
As technical platformMicrosoft TV IPTV Edition will be used. Apart from receiving linear TV program also interactive TV services will be provides, i.e. digital personal video recording as well as video on demand.
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