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digiBIZ—With carriage agreements in place with DIRECTV and FiOS TV, there’s a new MGM HD available for consumers in the Chicago area which is the studio’s highly-touted hi-def service bringing to viewers flicks from the studio’s 4,100 title film library… The set-top box analysis firm, Audience Analytics, has now been acquired by Nielsen. Their Audience Watch software is incorporated into the deal and will ensure Nielsen Digital Plus an expanded field of data including usage, measurement of VOD and other goodies. The new ratings systems from TiVo and TNS Media certainly had some cause and effect on Nielsen’s move… also biting the acquisition bullet is Revver, who reportedly have been acquired by LiveUniverse for just under $5 million. Revver is best known as having been on of the first, if not THE first, to offer a revenue-sharing scheme for indies on their video-sharing site. No one has of yet truly determined how best to make a decent living from web videos, but perhaps LiveUniverse has a plan in mind that will leverage Revver’s capabilities…
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digiDELIVERY—From BTX Technologies comes their new ProBLox system, a cost-effective solution to bundling numerous singles by combining 16 coax and 26 audio/data/control contacts in one multi-connector. Such allows for fast and simple set-up and tear down in broadcast and A/V apps. The field-terminable system is custom configurable for numerous combos of VGA, component, composite, balanced, and unbalanced audio, data, and control signals. The unit offers 75-ohm video contacts for a true HD signal. The ProBlox system reduces the number of individual cables for less clutter and a far more finished appearance. This unit will be available in June of this year—Hawthorne, New York
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digiCONTENT + DELIVERY—Crawford Satellite Services and one of the largest broadcast facilities in the United States have launched an MPEG-4 HD (high definition) platform on SES AMERICOM’s satellite AMC-18 for domestic distribution into cable and DBS (digital broadcast system) providers. This platform, using the latest technology, offers bandwidth efficient distribution and transport for programmers. With its HD launch on December 31, 2007, cable television network Tennis Channel used Crawford’s MPEG-4 service to allow satellite partner DIRECTV to access the signal. “Because of the tight time frame and quick turnaround necessary to get our HD distribution system in place, we needed to work with someone with Crawford’s level of experience and expertise,” said Keith Manasco, Vice President of Operations for the Tennis Channel. “We couldn’t be more pleased with the result. Through their efforts, millions of television viewers are enjoying tournament tennis in HD right now.” Crawford has selected Motorola’s MCPC (multiple channel per carrier) MPEG-4 HD platform with redundant encoding and multiplexing (mux) as its video compression system. With this state-of-the-art equipment, the company is able to employ DVB S2 advanced modulation and MPEG-4 compression technology which better utilizes satellite bandwidth. DVB S2 allows for the distribution of a greater number of channels on a single transponder. The MPEG-4 technology compresses an HD channel so that it uses less than half of the bandwidth required, as compared to an MPEG-2 HD signal. The result of the combined technologies gives Crawford the capacity to deliver seven to eight HD channels per transponder while maintaining outstanding HD quality—Atlanta, Georgia
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digiCONTENT—
Making tuneful creativity available to folk who heretofore may not have considered even touching an instrument is eMedia‘s new Version 2.0 of their eMedia Piano and Keyboard Method for Macintosh and Windows machines. This is an award-winning program that sports a far easier-to-use interface than earlier editions as well as the built-in ability to track your learning progress with an updated curriculum. Tag lined “The Easiest Way To Learn Piano!“, we’d have to agree, as there are more than 100 songs included in the entertaining teaching method with 300 lessons. Your specific music genre taste, whether classical, pop, folk, rock, blues or country, doesn’t matter at all. The instruction leads you from the basics of piano or keyboard playing, such as hand position, through rhythm, black key playing all the way to music notation and sight reading. If you use the software with an electronic MIDI keyboard, you receive specific feedback on any mistakes you may have made, such as playing the incorrect note or applying the wrong rhythm. An animated keyboard guides keyboard fingering and the guitar chords are also included for an accompanist. You can also repeat any music section you would like to practice and 70-included videos offer your technique demos. You can, when you get good enough, record your sessions to play them back, share, and compare your progress with earlier sessions, a hand tool to have as an addition. The instructor is Irma Irene Justicia, M.A., a pianist and teacher who has taught at the Juilliard School of Music. And, for those guitarists out there, check out this link and download two, free, guitar lessons. They are Midnight Special and House of the Rising Sun. Enjoy!—Seattle, Washington
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DELIVERY—Nagravision, a Kudelski Group company, has announced T-Mobile CZ, the leading mobile phone carrier in the Czech Republic, has selected Nagravision for the delivery of a trial OMA BCAST Smart Card Profile system. In partnership with T-Systems, and in line with T-Mobile, Czech Republic plans to launch a commercial mobile TV service in the near future. Nagravision established a test system for OMA BCAST Smart Card Profile in a complete play out eco-system. This will be to evaluate and certify the end-to-end performance of handsets, SIM cards, and headend in a close to real life environment before the full commercial service launch. The OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) designed the OMA BCAST Smart Card Profile as the standard service protection scheme for mobile TV services next to the formerly introduced DVB Open Security Framework. OMA BCAST Smart Card Profile enables interoperability between all Smartcard Profile enabled handsets and SIM cards, as well as with all Smartcard Profile Broadcast Service Management platforms—Cheseaux, Switzerland & Prague, Czech Republic
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digiDELIVERY—Other than opening up new offices in Bedford in the United Kingdom to better serve the European market, what else has Wohler Technologies been up to? They highlighted their HDMon family of Hi-Def monitors at CABSAT. These monitors monitor digital HD-SDI, SD-SDI or VI signals as well as analog composite, component, and RGBHV (red, green, blue, horizontal and vertical sync) video, and CGI images up to WUXGA (Wide Ultra XGA @ 1920×1200 resolution, a 16:10 ratio) resolution. Though primarily designed for 1080-line HD apps, each monitor offers noise reduction, motion interpolation, and motion-adaptive processing to ensure crisp, clear display of images, no matter their native resolution. The monitors may be used on the desktop or installed in a 19-inch wide rack. There’s also the choice of 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios, user-adjustable scaling, and as much as 170 degrees of off-axis viewing. There’s also a built-in 110 Base T Ethernet and RS232 connections—Hayward, California
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digiCONTENT—
Volantis Systems now dominates the device coverage for carrier and content providers with the 5,000th addition to its library. Volantis provides the Intelligent Content Delivery software delivering mobile content to more than 250 million mobile phone users and harbors the most notable count of devices worldwide. Nokia’s latest N96 phone, just intro’d at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain is the 5,000th device added. The N96, while not yet available to the public, is supported by Volantis content optimization. The mobile device is the most advanced Nokia handset to date, offering a pristine mobile web experience and 16 GB of internal storage. The Volantis database is the wireless industry’s largest and most detailed, with devices defined by as many as 650 feature and performance attributes and in use across the US, Europe, China, the Asia Pacific and Africa. The database covers such features as device operating system, browser type, useable screen size, and video download capacity, plus MIME types and codecs for supported content types. The Volantis Mobility Server, a mobile content delivery platform, leverages the device database for the optimized delivery and presentation of pages, navigation and menus, messages, downloads, and client content, regardless of device type. Volantis made its Mobility Server available as a free download in November 2007. The company has long contributed to a community standards process, driven by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to create the Device Independent Authoring Language (DIAL) spec. Web development markup languages that comply with DIAL, such as Volantis-created XDIME, can be used interchangeably to create content viewable on any mobile device—Surrey, United Kingdom
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