A Texas-based website operator has been arrested and charged with criminal copyright infringement, following seizure at the beginning of February of his domain name by U.S. Customs enforcement authorities.  Brian McCarthy, operator of the former website channelsurfing.net, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison on the copyright charge.  His website provided “linking” services that directed individuals to pirate TV streams on the web; McCarthy profited from advertisements placed on the site.  The U.S. attorney’s office, speaking after court documents were unsealed, said McCarthy “hid behind the anonymity of the Internet to make a quick buck through what is little more than high-tech thievery.”  See the official press release here. Find the original story on the domain seizures here.

Asia-Pacific is set to take the IPTV market by storm, according to research by analyst firm RNCOS.

The report, Global IPTV Market Forecast to 2014, shows that with promising IPTV subscriber growth taking place in countries including China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan; Asia-Pacific is emerging as the second largest IPTV market in the world.

RNCOS projects that by 2014 Asia-Pacific will account for around 45% of global IPTV subscribers . At present, IPTV penetration in most of the Asian markets is below 10%, but Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Japan have witnessed significant improvements in IPTV penetration during the past two years, and show immense potential for IPTV to become a comparable pay-TV platform.

Several factors are said to make Asia an attractive ground for IPTV . For example, the required infrastructure for IPTV service is already present with many countries in the region having broadband access networks boasting connection speeds higher than the rest of the world.

At the country level, together with the fast expanding broadband infrastructure and decreases in service price, an expanding middle class is transforming China into what the anlyst calls ‘the future IPTV dragon’.

Taiwan and Singapore have a relatively higher penetration of broadband and are pioneers in technology adoptions. Other markets including India, Malaysia, and Thailand are also fueling growth in the Asia-Pacific IPTV market. Additionally, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand are all expected to roll out IPTV services in near future.

Read more: Asia-Pacific to take almost half of IPTV subs by 2014 | News | Rapid TV News http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2011030210699/asia-pacific-to-account-for-nearly-half-of-global-iptv-subscribers-by-2014.html#ixzz1FajPlL3o

Singapore, February 23, 2011–According to the most recent market data from ABI Research, there were more than 704 million pay-TV subscribers globally at the end of 2010, increased more than 56 million subscribers from 2009.  The Asia-Pacific region, which owns 57% of global pay-TV subscriptions, remains the largest pay-TV market in the world.

“The growth rate is good in all pay-TV platforms except cable TV,” notes practice director Jason Blackwell. “High cable penetration in regions such as North America and Western Europe, and the increasing popularity of online video services, have resulted in slow growth in worldwide cable TV markets.”

“The growth rate is good in all pay-TV platforms except cable TV,” notes practice director Jason Blackwell. “High cable penetration in regions such as North America and Western Europe, and the increasing popularity of online video services, have resulted in slow growth in worldwide cable TV markets.”

“The growing numbers of digital TV households and high speed broadband households in the Asia-Pacific region enable operators to deliver advanced pay-TV packages such as high–definition (HDTV) and IPTV that offer more options to customers,” comments research associate Khin Sandi Lynn.

In terms of subscriptions, China and India already stand in the first and second positions respectively in the worldwide pay-TV market. However the low level of pay-TV penetration in these countries creates a great opportunity to expand the subscriber base. This is not only true of China and India: Thailand’s cable and satellite TV market is likely to boom as well in coming years, due to recent government plans for regulatory changes in the broadcasting industry.

The deployment of digital television is seen as a significant development in some countries. In 2010 more than half of all pay-TV subscribers are digital TV subscribers. Launches of high-definition (HDTV) television services via a variety of pay-TV platforms are being accelerated by operators around the world. In 2011, total HDTV subscriptions are expected to reach 225 million.

ABI Research’s new Market Data product, “Pay-TV Subscriber Market Data” is updated quarterly and profiles global pay-TV subscription information. Detailed market trends and market forecast information for key regions and countries around the world are provided where available. The study is a part of the company’s TV and Video Research Service.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 29 research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

Source: http://www.satellitemarkets.com/node/811

The mobile entertainment market seems to be turning into a real opportunity with revenues set to rise to $52.8 billion according to a new report by IE Market Research.If realised this would represent a compound annual growth of nearly 10% and mobile TV will see the biggest growth in the period says the Canadian-based provider of market intelligence services, in its Q1 2011 Global Mobile Entertainment Forecast.

“We think that the global mobile entertainment market will see significant growth over the next five year,” explained Nizar Assanie, Vice President (Research) at IEMR. “Among different categories of mobile multimedia, we expect that mobile TV will see the biggest growth in revenues over the next five years. We forecast that global mobile TV revenues (which are broadcast and unicast revenues) will increase from $2.52 billion in 2009 to $6.6 billion in 2015.”

The United States is sees as the current global hot-bed of mobile multimedia innovation both at the network and application layers. Assanie added:  “US operators are about six months to a year ahead of their Western European counterparts in the launch of 4G networks. This combined with the fact that many of the world’s largest technology companies, publishers, and content distributors are also based out of the U.S. now means that the U.S. has become the launching pad for many new and innovative services in the mobile multimedia space.”

Read more: Mobile entertainment to be worth over $50 billion by 2015 | News | Rapid TV News http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2011022810647/mobile-entertainment-market-to-be-worth-over-50-billion-by-2015.html#ixzz1FPBvCNO2

Driven by the uptake of Hybrid STBs and over-the-top (OTT) video, nearly three-quarters (72%) of pay-TV VOD requests will be free transactions by the end of 2011, according to a new report from IMS Research.The “On-demand Services Business Models: Video, Games & Over-the-Top – 2011 edition” report shows that on-demand services from pay-TV operators are becoming more robust each year and are set to generate $48 million for pay-TV operators this year. IMS Research forecasts that by 2016, OTT services delivered via pay-TV set-tops will generate $436 million in worldwide operator revenues.

IMS notes that common strategies of pay-TV operators include offering free on-demand content to subscribers of certain digital bundles and offering catch-up TV services via set-tops or online, and over the next couple of years, integrating OTT services into the set-top box for seamless multimedia delivery to subscribers. In addition, it says that direct-to-home (DTH) service providers are deploying IP-enabled hybrid set-top boxes to allow for more on-demand content delivery.

IMS Research calculates that in 2010, 37 million IP-enabled hybrid STBs shipped worldwide, with 42% of these being satellite boxes, allowing such operators to stay competitive with cable TV and IP networks, which the analyst regards as better suited for two-way interactive services such as VOD. Furthermore IMS Research forecasts that the cable TV segment will account for the majority of on-demand service revenues over the next five years, although its share will decrease from an estimated 66% in 2010 to a forecast 53% in 2016, mainly due on-demand service uptake on the satellite TV platform.

Commenting on the findings, report author, Anna Hunt, said: “OTT services are becoming one of the biggest threats to traditional pay-TV operators, and with devices such as smartphones and tablets proliferating the marketplace, consumers are quickly becoming accustomed to on-demand multimedia consumption. Offering a variety of on-demand services is now essential for digital TV operators that want to retain market leadership status.”

Read more: Free VOD from hybrid STBs, OTT rattle traditional pay-TV | News | Rapid TV News http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2011030110660/free-vod-hybrid-stbs-and-ott-threaten-traditional-pay-tv-operators.html#ixzz1FPBBPb6t

The mobile TV market offers great potential across the world over the next two years according to new research by RNCOS.

The firm’s “Global Mobile TV Forecast to 2013” predicts that the number of mobile TV subscribers worldwide will grow at a CAGR of over 47% during 2010 – 2013 on the back of increasing mobile subscribers. The analyst says that rapid growth into the overall mobile phone market has led to a very high mobile TV penetration rate in most of the major markets. Moreover, with mobile market penetration now greater than 90% in many countries, it has firm belief that mobile TV has the potential to appeal to the mass market. 

Given the growth, RNCOS sees big opportunities for various industry players including mobile operators, content providers and handset manufacturers alike.

 

The research suggests that success for mobile TV players rests fundamentally in operators’ service pricing models coupled with the availability of handsets that support good picture quality at high data transfer rate. In terms of delivery methods, RNCOS expects streaming video technology to dominate the global mobile TV subscriber base by the end of 2013.

Read more: Mobile TV to grow 47% over next two years | News | Rapid TV News http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2011022810625/mobile-tv-to-grow-47-over-next-two-years.html#ixzz1FKIgjzbO

Pro Sports vs. the Web Pirates

Leagues from the NFL and NBA to Ultimate Fighting are finding it nearly impossible to block pirate video sites from streaming live events

By Brad Stone

It’s Saturday, Feb. 5, at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, and 11,000 screaming fans are watching as barefoot brawlers pummel each other senseless in the latest bouts of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the popular mixed martial arts league. Edward Muncey is engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat, but not in the ring; he’s at a keyboard in a room a few hundred feet away that reverberates with the percussive roar from the nearby arena. Dressed in a black pinstripe suit, the UFC’s vice-president of new media and technology pitches forward on an uncomfortable hotel chair before three computer screens, tensely trawling the Internet to find and shut down unauthorized live broadcasts of the evening’s matches.

It’s an almost impossible task. As the night progresses, unauthorized video streams of the event sprout across the Web like weeds on an endless lawn. Although Muncey has contracted with several anti-piracy firms around the world, he personally identifies more than 200 illegal broadcasts of the fight playing on a single site: Justin.tv, the live video streaming service, based in San Francisco. He’s able to shut these down quickly using a Web tool that Justin.tv makes available to copyright holders. He has less luck with videos of the event he finds on SopCast.com, a Malaysian peer-to-peer network; vShare.tv, a Dutch streaming site; and dozens of other far-flung sites and blogs. Muncey and his team fire off hundreds of threatening e-mails to the operators of these websites, demanding that they take down the illicit feeds. Many comply, but others respond slowly or not at all. “It’s like someone stole your car and is celebrating by doing a donut on the parking lot next door,” Muncey says.

Sports leagues once viewed the Internet’s disruption of other entertainment industries from a relatively safe perch. The Web was terrific for sharing digital music and television programs, but it wasn’t really great for games in progress—when outcomes are still in doubt and fans are most interested. Now the technology has improved and pirates can easily divert authorized broadcasts from TV networks onto their own websites. They have powerful computers, fast broadband connections, and operations in countries such as China, Sweden, and the Netherlands, which have less rigorous copyright protection laws and anti-piracy enforcement. This past National Football League season, for example, fans could find and watch almost any game they wanted to see, as long as they didn’t mind inconsistent video quality and the occasional inconvenience of having to find a new stream when the one they were watching shut down.

“We all knew this tsunami was coming,” says Eric Goldman, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University and an adviser to Justin.tv, who does not speak for the company. “Some of the businesses that leagues had in the past are going to get much harder to control.”

It’s not as if sports leagues haven’t contended with piracy before. For years, rogue bar owners purchased pay-per-view or satellite feeds and displayed them to their clientele without making the proper payments. But this new kind of Internet piracy could be far more difficult to stop and strikes right at the heart of leagues like the UFC, which asks fans for $45 to watch a night of action on pay-per-view television—or via its own website. With thousands of Internet users able to watch a single unauthorized broadcast and countless illicit channels springing up across the Web, the potential financial losses for leagues such as the UFC are devastating.

The country’s major sports leagues are all vulnerable, but in different ways. They make billions selling exclusive broadcast contracts to TV networks and high-priced stadium seats to fans, then go to great lengths to protect those lucrative businesses. For instance, in most cities, Major League Baseball does not allow fans to watch the games of their hometown team online, because local broadcasters fear it might damage the TV ratings of televised games. And the NFL blacks out games in the city of the home team if the stadium is not sold out. Piracy undermines the leagues’ effort to create such artificial scarcities. It also gives a fan interested only in the Baltimore Ravens, say, a reason to avoid paying $300 a year or more for satellite provider DirecTV’s NFL Ticket package, which includes every game each weekend.

Conversations with representatives of MLB, the NFL, the National Basketball Assn., and the National Hockey League suggest that Internet piracy of live games is a growing problem. The NFL says it took down 4,130 unauthorized live streams of its games during the 2010 season—a 67 percent jump from the total in 2009. “It’s a game of Whac-A-Mole,” Gary Gertzog, the NFL’s senior vice-president of legal and business affairs, says of sites that allow users to stream games live. “We tell them to stop, they agree to stop, we look later, and they are back at it. This is not where we want to see growth.”

To slow that growth, sports leagues, like media companies also tormented by digital pirates, are fighting back any way they can. They’ve teamed up in an industry coalition, they’ve filed lawsuits, and they’re lobbying for more aggressive copyright legislation. On Jan. 24, in a move reminiscent of Viacom’s (VIA.B) unsuccessful 2007 lawsuit against YouTube (GOOG), Zuffa, the Las Vegas-based owner of the UFC, sued Justin.tv in federal court in Nevada, alleging that the four-year-old venture-capital-backed startup wasn’t doing enough to keep infringing material off its website. (A Justin.tv spokesman would not comment on the suit.) Most intellectual-property experts believe Justin.tv complies with the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which says website owners are protected if they move expeditiously to take down infringing content when notified by a copyright holder. That doesn’t satisfy Dana White, the pugnacious president of the UFC, who is most critical of streaming sites that run ads alongside his copyrighted video. Says White: “The people I want to see obliterated are the guys making a business out of stealing our stuff.”

Earlier this month, at the urging of all the major sports leagues, Uncle Sam jumped into the ring. On Feb. 2 federal investigators seized the domain names of 10 foreign-owned sites that had become hubs for sports fans looking for free sports broadcasts online. From that day on, when fans visited sites such as ATDHE.net, based in Sweden, or Rojadirecta.org, based in Spain, they were greeted by a Web page featuring the insignias of the Justice Dept., Homeland Security Dept., and National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. “This is a first step. It’s a disruptive tactic,” says James Hayes, special agent at Homeland Security, who led the operation.

It may also have been a symbolic one. Within a few hours the pirate sites had moved to new Web addresses, outside the reach of U.S. authorities. Their owners were openly sharing the new URLs with their followers on Twitter, and some were boldly promising they would carry live feeds of the upcoming UFC fight. “What keeps us up at night is piracy,” admits Lawrence Epstein, UFC’s general counsel. “If we have an Achilles’ heel, this is it.”

Last August, Muncey set out with a UFC colleague to understand the mind of the Internet pirate. The pair flew to Phoenix and met with Hazim Gaber, the former operator of the video site WatchTVSitcoms.com, who had recently been convicted of another crime—selling counterfeit cancer drugs—and had agreed to cooperate with investigators and copyright owners as a condition of his 33-month prison sentence.

Gaber, 22, a native of Edmonton, Alta., was led into a windowless room in the U.S. Federal Building wearing handcuffs. He immediately recognized the names of Muncey and his colleague from the numerous cease-and-desist letters they had sent him over the previous three years, which he had studiously ignored. In the ensuing discussion, Gaber gave the UFC officials a reason for optimism. He said the legal threats from sports leagues always felt hollow, and that he would have stopped posting unauthorized video if he had ever actually been sued.

Muncey says the league was emboldened by Gaber’s insights. In addition to suing Justin.tv, it recently filed a series of other lawsuits against sites allegedly promoting unauthorized streams of its fights. Epstein hints that the company is currently busy preparing others. “We need to see people in handcuffs,” he says.

A second target could be the online advertising networks that display ads on video sites without regard for the legality of the material on those sites. After Gaber suggested that the league “follow the money” and pursue such ad networks, the UFC met with executives from a Las Vegas online ad company called CPAlead, whose banner ads regularly appeared on martial arts enthusiast sites that hosted the league’s copyrighted video without permission. Since that meeting, the UFC says it has not seen CPAlead’s ads. John T. Bryant, a CPAlead representative, says: “These aren’t the types of things that CPAlead condones or supports.”

Despite that success, the UFC faces an uphill battle. Many of these sites, based in countries with lax copyright enforcement, are unwilling to cooperate with U.S. companies. And given the decentralized nature of the Internet, they may be impossible to eliminate altogether.

One variety of pirate video source, the so-called link site, does nothing but present a handy menu of pointers to other Web pages where Internet users can watch live games for free. These sites, such as ATDHE, Channelsurf, and Rojadirecta, do not host any video themselves, and their owners express indignation when asked about piracy. “We just inform about sports events available on the Internet,” writes Igor Seoane, the 27-year-old founder of Rojadirecta, in an e-mail to Bloomberg Businessweek. “Those events are there with or without Rojadirecta, most of them linked by any search engine. We do not think it is our responsibility to make even economical efforts to help copyright owners.” Seoane says a Spanish court dismissed a copyright case against his site in 2008. He also brags that he links to 1,000 games every weekend.

The operators of other linking sites are not quite as strident. In January, ATDHE ranked as the 687th most popular site in the world, according to tracking firm Alexa. Its owners did not respond to multiple requests for comment. On one recent evening, shortly after it had reestablished itself at a new Web address (following the U.S. government intervention), the ATDHE site featured links to live broadcasts of every NBA and NHL game, in addition to several big college basketball games and international soccer matches. NetResult, an anti-piracy firm based in the U.K., has sent numerous takedown notices to the site’s Internet service provider, PeRiQuito AB, which also hosts The Pirate Bay, the notorious BitTorrent file trading service, according to Christopher Stokes, chief executive officer of NetResult. The ISP declined to take action against ATDHE because it said no illegal streams were coming from the site.

Sites such as Rojadirecta and ATDHE would have nothing to link to if it weren’t for the sites that actually host live video and allow it to be played by any Internet user. These sites, like Justin.tv, Ustream, and dozens of others around the world, characterize themselves as “YouTubes of live video.” Many promote the ability of their users to broadcast, say, their child’s school play, then stream it to relatives around the world, who can all watch at the same time. But these sites are also magnets for users who post live copyrighted broadcasts such as TV shows and sporting events. This can be as simple as purchasing a $50 HDTV adapter, which plugs into a computer’s USB port and allows the PC to receive live TV. Deploying so-called screencast programs that make copies of everything on the PC screen, a user can then capture a channel carrying a sports event and stream it over a live video site.

Some of these video hosting sites, such as Zonein.tv and vShare.tv, both based in Holland, appear to be oriented solely toward this kind of illicit use. They publish no contact information or details about their owners and are largely unresponsive to takedown requests, sports leagues say. (Muncey, of the UFC, says someone representing vShare.tv once wrote to the league demanding a payment of $5,000 per month to hire someone to scrub the site of the league’s material.)

The video hosting sites in the U.S. are generally more responsive to copyright owners, and most offer tools to allow leagues to quickly close down streams of their broadcasts when they find them. Sports leagues in particular praise Ustream, based in San Francisco, which they say has employees manually review channels that are suspected to contain copyrighted content (streams that suddenly attract large audiences, or are initiated by new users, are flagged). Justin.tv, on the other hand, does not conduct such manual reviews and frustrates executives at the sports leagues, which say its users have gotten adept at quickly republishing unauthorized broadcasts as soon as they are removed.

All leagues say they actively monitor these sites for their content, but policing them has become arduous and expensive, and new sites are springing up all the time. Veetle, a live video startup run by former Stanford students and based in Palo Alto, Calif., pledges to abide by the DMCA by promptly removing infringing content whenever it is asked. During the UFC match, Muncey and his team identified 26 live streams of the fight on the site, and Veetle quickly complied with takedown requests.

“Our goal is to have content owners be able to identify potentially infringing content and take it down in an expeditious fashion,” said Bo Yang, chief executive of Veetle, in an interview a few days after the fight. As Yang spoke, this reporter was able to watch an unauthorized stream on Veetle of the Los Angeles Lakers playing the Memphis Grizzlies. The Lakers were ahead, 48 to 45, in the second quarter.

Sports league executives naturally like to point to their limited victories in combating the pirates. A Chinese website called TVAnts.com once bedeviled MLB by posting live feeds of many games during the 2009 season. Officials from baseball’s MLB.com subsidiary investigated the site and found that its domain name was registered to a computer science professor at Zhejiang University on the east coast of China. When the site was unresponsive to takedown requests, the league wrote a letter to the university president. The school responded politely, disclaiming any involvement and offering assistance, and the site disappeared soon after.

Still, sports leagues acknowledge that their own enforcement efforts will never fully vanquish the piracy threat. Executives at the major sports leagues also expressed little interest in suing the individual fans sitting at home watching these streams. For one thing, this would require leagues to somehow force the video sites to disclose their users’ identities. Instead, the leagues are leaning hard on legislators to increase the criminal penalties for copyright infringers and to improve the tools at the disposal of law enforcement. One of their goals, to the alarm of advocates of an unregulated Internet, is to limit the safe harbor protections given to website operators under the DMCA.

“How does the DMCA even apply to live events?” asks Epstein, the UFC’s general counsel, as he sips an energy drink at the fight in Las Vegas. The DMCA calls for sites to take infringing material down “expeditiously” when notified by copyright holders. But, Epstein argues, that’s meaningless for live sporting events, where people can get the full value of a match after watching only the final few minutes.

Sports leagues have recently offered their enthusiastic support for a bill, proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in September, called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, or COICA. The law would give the Justice Dept. a new set of legal tools to go after “rogue sites” that are violating copyrights or facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods. Among the new tactics proposed, federal officials could compel Internet service providers to block U.S. Web users’ access to overseas piracy sites and force ad networks and payment processors such as Visa (V) to stop doing business with them. The bill unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. A new version of it is expected to get a hearing by the full Senate this year.

Internet civil liberties groups have vigorously objected to the proposed law for a variety of reasons. They say it would undermine the world’s trust in the U.S. stewardship of the domain name system and deprive websites of due process. The law, they add, would potentially harm all but the savviest Internet users, who would easily circumvent it by using foreign-operated Internet services to access blacklisted sites. “The bill gives a tremendous amount of power to the government without the appropriate safeguards,” says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy nonprofit. Recently, opponents of the bill say, there was a fresh illustration of the futility of the bill’s approach. “We’ve seen the problems the government has had in trying to shut down WikiLeaks,” says Goldman, of Santa Clara University. “WikiLeaks has proved COICA is ill-fated.”

Aside from backing new legislation, sports leagues are looking to new anti-piracy companies such as Vobile, based in Santa Clara, Calif., to solve their piracy problem. Vobile analyzes and creates a “digital fingerprint” of live broadcasts from TV networks and sports leagues. Then cooperative websites and ISPs create their own fingerprint of the video streamed by their users and search Vobile’s database, flagging any videos that generate a positive match and blocking any that are unauthorized by the copyright holder. The MLB and NBA have both used the service while the NFL has dropped it, because “the technology has not worked as well as they said it would,” says the NFL’s Gertzog.

That leaves the leagues, for the time being, with little recourse other than letters, lawsuits, lobbying—and the kind of laborious and perhaps futile enforcement efforts of Edward Muncey at the UFC bout in Las Vegas. That night, Muncey spends close to five straight hours at his Dell laptop, which is so overrun with malware from visiting illicit pirate websites that it crashes frequently. As the night grinds on—and despite his best efforts—the league’s piracy problem grows worse. When the main card begins at around 9:15 p.m., matching two middleweights, Brazilians Anderson Silva and Vitor Belfort, Muncey grumbles, the Web “lights up like a Christmas tree” with unauthorized streams of the fight.

The much-hyped fight, though, proves anticlimactic. The fighters circle each other warily for three minutes, and then abruptly, Silva delivers a single kick to Belfort’s face, dropping him to the ground and ending the evening. The crowd erupts in violence-induced ecstasy, but in the adjoining room, Muncey doesn’t even look up from his computer. He’s fixated on Justin.tv’s website, where at the conclusion of the event there are still 17 live feeds of the fight listed prominently in the sports section. Although the point is now moot, Muncey keeps submitting takedown requests. “This makes me sick inside,” he says.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218066626285.htm

NEW DELHI: Although it has revised its suggested sunset date for digitisation, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has refused to accept the government’s view to put the D-Day on 31 March 2015 and instead opted for June 2014 for all cable operators to move to digital television signals.

In response to the Government’s suggestions to Trai’s earlier report, the regulator has suggested the four metro cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai should shift to digital cable by December 31 this year. For cities which have a population of over one million, it has suggested December 2012 as the timeline.

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry had raised concerns over lack of availability of large numbers of set-top-boxes that are required to receive digital cable signals and proposed a longer period to allow cable operators to shift to the new system.

However in a letter to the Ministry, Trai chairman J S Sarma said the indigenous set-top-box makers can schedule production plans as per the digitalisation time plan. The I&B ministry had raised concerns over lack of availability of large numbers of set-top-boxes that are required to receive digital cable signals and proposed a longer period to allow cable operators to shift to the new system. He also said that the set-top-boxes can be imported to meet the requirement and the global production capacity of the equipment is much more than what is needed for a national rollout of digitalisation.

But Trai has said that as some time has elapsed since the report submitted by it in August last year, it had agreed to certain changes in timelines.

Thus cities with more than a million population will be digitised by 31 December 2012 instead of March 2013, as proposed by the Ministry, all urban areas by 31 December 2013 instead of by March 2014, and the rest of the country by 31 December 2013.

The broadcast sector regulator said it should be possible to complete Phase III and Phase IV by 31 December 2013, but as some lead time would be inevitable for Phase four, the date can be stretched to 30 June 2014.

It has also suggested the setting up of a Task Force in the Ministry to oversee the process of digitisation. This Task Force would have representation from all stakeholders.

Earlier, I&B Secretary Raghu Menon had written to Sarma on 28 January asking it to review its recommendations in the light of the Ministry’s concerns.

Trai said it had accorded due consideration to each concern expressed by the government and sought to answer it.

Source: http://www.casbaa.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_content

New research on video usage in connected TV homes has revealed that downloading and viewing digital video on the PC are the principal modes of consumption.

 

According to In-Stat’s new research survey Home Video Libraries, Storage, and Viewing Trends, even though many broadcasters and supplier are extolling the virtues of the cloud, it is the more tried and trusted methods of downloading and storing that users are still trusting.

 

“The digital entertainment industry is pushing US consumers to shift to electronic sell-through (EST) and to build electronic home video libraries.” says Keith Nissen, Principal Analyst.  “However, digital video usage models are now a mix of physical discs, free content, video on demand, streaming and rental models, in addition to outright purchases.  Nevertheless, downloading and storing video is a growing and important element in the overall mix. ”

Nearly half of US broadband households report that they store their electronic video home library on their desktop PC with 30% using their notebook PCs to watch video. Yet only 38% of broadband households back up their video libraries. By 2015, predicts In-Stat, US broadband households will collectively be storing over 4.5 million GBytes of professional video content, which translates to up to 65 GBytes stored per household.

 

Despite the best wishes of suppliers and the proliferation of such devices around the home, only small percentages of people stored video on gaming devices, portable media players, Flash devices, and mobile handsets. The survey also showed that almost two-thirds (64%) of US broadband home acquire, store, and view video content on the same device. Even though people had the capability of storing copies of the same content on separate devices, and could potentially do so in greater numbers, only a tenth currently view locally stored video on multiple devices.

Read more: Downloading and PC video dominate connected TV home | News | Rapid TV News http://www.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/2011022510589/downloading-and-pc-video-viewing-dominate-tv-everywhere-in-the-home.html#ixzz1FDeUeuXo