Networking giant Cisco Systems announced another acquisition this week. This time the company said it will buy the set-top division of a Chinese digital cable technology company.
Late Monday, Cisco said it would pay a total of about $44.5 million for the set-top unit of DVN. It will pay $17.5 million upfront, and the remaining $27 million will be paid over four years, based on the unit achieving sales milestones.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of next year, and it is subject to the approval of regulators and DVN shareholders.
Cisco is also partnering with the rest of DVN to provide joint customers with expanded services.
The DVN unit being acquired makes products that connect digital signals to televisions. Cisco already makes and sells set-top boxes for customers around the world through its Scientific Atlanta division.
Cisco sees a big opportunity in the Chinese cable market, which it says is the largest in the world with 160 million subscribers and with an additional 200 million subscribers expected to become customers in the next few years.
China is in the process of moving its cable subscribers to digital. The government has mandated that all cable be digital by 2015, Cisco said. Today only about a third of Chinese cable customers are using digital cable.
This is the fourth acquisition that Cisco has announced since the beginning of October. The company has spent about $6.2 billion in total during this shopping spree.
Boxee, a New York-based start-up that makes "media center" software, announced Wednesday that it has raised $6 million in a Series B financing round led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated in the round.
Boxee raised its series A round, to the tune of $4 million, last November. With the new financing the company hopes to ink more deals with media companies and set-top box manufacturers, as well as hire more employees to keep building out its technology (which includes a developer platform). Currently in an alpha test phase, Boxee hopes to expand to a beta test in October.
More deals will also help Boxee gain some industry cred. It has still been unable to convince Hulu, now the big name in premium online video, to reverse a ban on Boxee's access to its content--which includes a huge library from NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney's ABC Entertainment.
"I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners," CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. "And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu."
"Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users," Ronen said.
As more entertainment content makes it way online, Comcast is looking for new ways to remain relevant to its subscribers.
Specifically, the cable giant is launching a bunch of new initiatives to bring more interactive content to its services and keep its subscribers hooked on cable. First on the list is the company's proposed free online video-on-demand service. The service, which will be offered as part of Comcast's Fancast video site, has been discussed publicly for the past couple of months. But the company has kept the details, such as when it will launch and what content will be offered, under wraps.
What is known is that Comcast expects to offer the service free of charge to its existing cable TV customers. In a recent interview with PC World, Karin Gilford, the Comcast Interactive executive in charge of the cable provider's Fancast video site, said with a user name and password, subscribers will be able to access any standard or premium cable content that their cable subscription entitles them to watch.
The service will let users watch TV on their laptops or computers, and eventually it might even be available on cell phones. What will make the service different from other online video sites, such as Hulu.com or TV.com (which is owned by CBS, publisher of CNET News), is that it will feature premium cable content from sources like HBO, ESPN, and CNN. This content has largely been off-limits to free online video aggregators.
But because Fancast online video-on-demand viewers must subscribe to cable TV, the new service won't act as cable replacement. In other words, it's simply an extension of Comcast's existing cable service. This is an important element of the service, because it ensures that Comcast doesn't cannibalize its own lucrative paid TV business.
Apps, to boot
In addition to online video, Comcast is also dipping its toe into online application waters. The company announced earlier this week that it is working with Adobe Systems to embed its Flash technology on set-top boxes used by its TV subscribers. Sree Kotay, senior vice president and chief software architect at Comcast, recently told the Web site Contentinople that the company plans to enable widgets and other Flash-based applications on its set-top box.
Kotay said he sees Flash as a software platform that could allow the company to quickly add new applications to the set-top box. And he said that these applications could be built by Comcast or they could also be built by third party developers. The company was showing off the new set-top box at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas this week.
Kotay hinted at potentially creating an application storefront akin to Apple's iPhone App Store. He said that the App Store was a good example of how companies can maintain control over applications to ensure quality and also easily distribute them to consumers.
But he stopped short of indicating whether Comcast would provide a monetization mechanism through its own customer relationship. This would be easy enough to do, considering that Comcast has a direct billing relationship with consumers and could easily provide one-click purchasing. But Kotay said it was still too early to discuss business models.
For now, Comcast is still in the exploratory phases of how it can keep pace with the online world. It will be interesting to see if subscribers use the Fancast video on demand site and what kinds of applications and widgets will be developed for the TV.
A mock-up of what Adobe Flash for TVs would look like.
(Credit: Adobe)From the PC to the TV, Adobe Systems wants to bring rich Web animation and video into consumers' living rooms.
The company will on Monday announce its latest version of its Flash multimedia platform that will essentially put its technology in Internet connected TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and other digital home devices. The main purpose of the TV and consumer electronics optimized Flash is to allow viewers to see high-definition video, interactive applications and new user interfaces right on their TVs.
As part of the announcement, the company revealed a number of partners that plan to use the technology, including, Intel, Comcast, Disney Interactive, Netflix, Atlantic Records, and the New York Times Company.
Until now, Adobe's Flash Player has mainly been used on computers to make animation and video from Web sites like YouTube available in a Web browser. And the company has been very successful in this market. About 80 percent of online videos worldwide are viewed using Adobe Flash technology, according to comScore.
The company has also adapted its technology to create a mobile version of Flash that is used on smartphones. The mobile version lets people watch Flash-enabled video on the go. Now Adobe is turning its attention to the living room and big screen HD TVs. This means that people could have full access to the entire YouTube library of video on their TVs instead of a subset that has been specially encoded for TV viewing.
"There are some products and services that offer a subset of online video for TVs," said Anup Murarka, director of technology strategy and partner development for Adobe's Flash Platform Business Unit. "But they don't provide all the content. For example, a lot of devices play back YouTube content. But they can't offer all the videos on YouTube."
Developers will also be able to create "widgets" for TVs to help bring Web content onto the TV screen. Widgets are specially designed Web applications that can easily be added to consumer electronics devices.
Yahoo is also offering widget technology for TVs, which it co-developed with Intel. The Yahoo Widget Channel provides access to Flickr, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Finance, USA Today, YouTube, eBay and Showtime Networks, among others. Motorola, Samsung, and Toshiba are all planning to add Yahoo Widgets on some of their new TVs.
Murarka said that Yahoo is not really competing with Adobe. He pointed out that both Adobe and Yahoo are working with Intel, and he said the Flash technology was actually complimentary to what Yahoo is doing with its Widget Channel.
"Yahoo supports Flash on desktops and our hope is that they will support Flash in TVs as well," he said. "We see Flash as being valuable in a number of new frame works."
Murarka wouldn't say which consumer electronics makers plan to use the new version of Flash, but the technology is available to device makers and application developers now. And Flash-enabled TVs and set-tops should be out later this year.
More than 800 digital-media enthusiasts in New York RSVP'd for a Tuesday night "meet-up" held by Boxee, the TV browser software company that's ambitiously (and controversially) aimed to make it possible to have a full Web content experience in your living room.
Right now, Boxee sources content from outlets such as Comedy Central, Netflix, CBS (which publishes CNET News), and Web video content hubs such as Blip.tv and Next New Networks.
In conjunction with the get-together, Boxee (still available only for Mac and Linux) made a few notable announcements: First of all, it's overhauled its application program interface (API)--which was only three weeks old to begin with--so that developers can build more complex applications for the platform.
There are a few new ones at launch: streaming-radio provider Pandora now has an application to bring its content to Boxee, as well as terrestrial-radio hub RadioTime. A third-party company called BoxeeHQ has also created an app to stream content from PBS.
Boxee's content-browsing software is now built on the XUL framework, which makes it a "remote cousin of Firefox," CEO Avner Ronen said. It will detect a video in a regular Web page and then attempt to pull it into a full-screen view. Guess what this means: Content from Hulu will be back, at least for now.
For those who stepped in late: Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., had been available as a channel on Boxee until access was blocked at the request of content partners. Boxee brought it back by pulling in Hulu's RSS feed, but then Hulu blocked that too.
Still in alpha test mode, Boxee has gained a loyal following among geeks who love its hackability, futurists who see it as the best hope for the why-won't-it-happen-already convergence between TV and the Web, and people fed up with subscription cable services. But on the flip side, it's still unclear as to how the start-up will dig through the complicated stratigraphy of media industry regulations, and it's also unclear as to how it will make money.
Ronen hinted that an "app store" format will be part of its strategy, letting developers charge for their applications and taking a cut of sales, in addition to advertising. Also down the pipeline: an improved search feature that will let members search all Boxee content at once rather than only within individual content providers one at a time.
Boxee also released its first iPhone app this month. It's not a video app, though--it's an app to remotely control the Boxee browser over a Wi-Fi connection. Ronen says the company's received "great feedback" on it.
Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.
But it's not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.
"Like IE, Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites," a post on the Boxee blog by CEO Avner Ronen read. "While it's not as attractive or robust as our previous Hulu application, it will additionally support Hulu's public RSS feeds."
Industry talks continue, the post continued. "While we don't come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. Our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point," Ronen wrote. "They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time."
Set-top maker gets a new CFO amid a reorg.
(Credit: Vudu)Only 16 months ago, Vudu, the maker of a movie-playing set-top box, was generating splashy headlines in publications like The New York Times.
Now the company, which bills itself as a video store in a box, is at the center of speculation about layoffs and executive upheaval.
Last week, CE Pro reported that the company had reduced staff by nearly 20 percent, or about 16 to 18 employees out of 100.
A Vudu representative confirmed via e-mail that the company had reduced staffing but declined to discuss figures. Vudu "had to restructure a bit from each department" the representative wrote. "The restructuring is all part of the company reorg to focus more on sales and distribution."
On Monday, Vudu announced that it named Chris Watts, a former eBay executive, as the company's new chief financial officer. What happened to the old CFO? You guessed it: "The former CFO left for personal reasons," according to the representative. CE Pro also reported that one of the company's founders has left the company. Vudu denied that either of it's two founders have left.
Chris Albrecht of NewTeeVee pointed out that some of the company's most recent moves, which includes adding pornography and a 99-cent bargain bin "don't exactly scream stability."
Meanwhile, the number of set-top boxes that transfer movies from the Web to consumers' TVs has exploded. Amid all the growth, Vudu has become an also-ran.
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