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Monday, October 7, 2002 |
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• CinemaNow to trial Universal Studios' content • Terayon bows new CherryPicker • AT&T brings broadband to Latino youths • Telecom layoffs drop, but industry is still hurting
CinemaNow to trial Universal Studios' content Universal Studios Pay-Per-View has turned to CinemaNow Inc. to test the waters for downloading and streaming its content. During a four-month trial, CinemaNow will offer first-run and catalog Universal titles via its video-on-demand Web site www.cinemanow.com. The titles will be available in streaming and download formats. Beginning in November, first-run titles Big Fat Liar, The Scorpion King and Brotherhood of the Wolf will be available on the site. Catalog titles also will run during the trial, including Erin Brockovich and Psycho. "Universal recognizes that Internet video-on-demand is a growing distribution platform for feature films with increasing demand and revenue potential," said Holly Leff-Pressman, senior vice president of worldwide PPV and VOD. Universal is licensing the content to CinemaNow because it can offer its titles while testing the quality and security of the environment, said Leff-Pressman. The video-on-demand distributor's proprietary PatchBay
VOD technology will handle the content distribution in the trial,
including digital and territorial rights protection, user profiling,
pay-per-view and subscription services and detailed report generation. Related stories:
Less than two weeks after announcing its plan to buy Wink Communications, OpenTV has closed the deal. OpenTV picked up the interactive television company from Liberty Broadband Interactive Television for $101 million, the exact amount Liberty Broadband recently paid to acquire Wink. Liberty Broadband bought a controlling interest in OpenTV in May. Wink's Tim Travaille will assume the position of interim chief operating officer of OpenTV. Travaille is replacing Marty Leamy, who has decided to step down as president and chief operating officer. OpenTV also has snapped up ACTV. The two acquisitions
gives OpenTV roughly $160 million in cash, no debt and expands
its worldwide footprint to more than 35 million homes with one
or more of its iTV products or services, according to the company. Related stories:
Terayon Communication Systems Inc. has planted another seed in digital video management system product garden. The latest: Terayon is demonstrating its DM 6400 Network CherryPicker. The DM 6400 is designed to enable cable operators to deliver four high-definition television programs in one channel at 256 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) through rate shaping. Rate shaping is a real-time adjustment of digital video bit rates to allow for a given amount of bandwidth. An Application Specific Integrated Circuit enables the box to support multiple digital video applications simultaneously, according to Terayon. A single ASIC-based DM 6400 is designed to support multiple digital video applications on every program. The ASIC is programmable, which gives Terayon the ability to add new functionality and support new standards. The DM 6400 competes with BigBand Networks' Broadband Multimedia-Service Router (BMR) box. AT&T, Cox Communications, Time Warner and Charter Communications Inc. are among Terayon's CherryPicker customers. Related stories:
Video-on-demand server systems startup Broadbus Technologies Inc. has received a $12 million shot in the arm. Comcast Interactive Capital participated in the Series A-1 round of financing. Broadbus came onto the VOD scene in 1999. The company, which has not announced when it will begin market trials, plans to offer a VOD system powered by its B-1 Streaming Media Server family. The line features high-density random access memory (RAM) subsystems. The servers are designed for the delivery of VOD services over cable networks. The round was led by Battery Ventures and Charles River Ventures. Battery Ventures' Todd Dagres and Charles River's Santo Politi will join Broadbus' board of directors. In April, Broadbus signed on as a Starz on Demand Subscription VOD Deployment Partner. The deal enables Broadbus to include Starz on Demand content in its deployments. Related stories:
AT&T brings broadband to Latino youths Many Latino youths do not have broadband access in their homes, so the ASPIRA Association plans to open two new community technology centers to bring high-speed Internet access into their lives. A $225,000 grant from the AT&T Foundation will help establish the centers. The centers, which will be outfitted with the latest computer technologies, will be located in Bronx, N.Y. and Bridgeport, Conn. More than 4,000 Latino youths are expected to benefit from the technology centers. ASPIRA is a national organization dedicated to the
education and leadership development of Latino youth. "We've
found that the school retention rate of kids who have Internet
access to be much higher than those who don't," ASPIRA President
and CEO Ronald Blackburn-Moreno said in a prepared statement.
Of the 54 million U.S. households with Internet access in 2000,
only 9.5 million were Hispanic households, according to the US
Census Bureau. AT&T has contributed more than $500,000 in grants to help ASPIRA build 13 community centers in major-market cities. Eight of the facilities are located in urban areas in New York and New Jersey.
Telecom layoffs drop, but industry is still hurting
The number of U.S. telecommunications sector employees thrown out of work in the third quarter of this year fell 52 percent from the previous quarter, helping drive a 31 percent overall drop in technology job cuts, according to a new survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago consulting firm that is a leader in tracking employment trends. Among the survey's findings: The number of telecom employees laid off in September fell to its lowest level since November 2000. But company chief executive John A. Challenger said that could be a statistical anomaly or an indication that already radically shrunken companies like Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, and WorldCom are running out of people to fire. "Some companies may be down to bare bones now and cannot afford to eliminate any more jobs without going out of business," Challenger said. He added: "It is probably too early to celebrate, considering that several high-tech indicators have not shown much promise." Moreover, in five of the last seven years, the fourth quarter has turned out to be the worst period of the year for layoff announcements, Challenger said in an interview. According to the Challenger survey, US telecom, computer, electronics, and e-commerce companies announced a total of 91,450 job reductions during July, August, and September. That was down from 132,953 in the April-to-June quarter and from 213,420 in the third quarter of 2001. It was the smallest number of tech sector layoffs since the fourth quarter of 2000. For the first nine months of this year, a total of 334,650 high-tech job reductions have been announced, down 36 percent from the same period last year. Fully one-third of the just over 1 million announced US job reductions this year involved high-tech jobs, Challenger said. Locally, the past several weeks have brought few indications that the tech sector is clearly bottoming out. Last Thursday, for example, data storage giant EMC Corp. of Hopkinton said it would lay off 1,350 workers, about 7 percent of its work force, after it said it would have a worse-than-expected loss of 2 cents per share for the third quarter. The same day, business telecommunications service provider CTC Communications of Waltham filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and said it was laying off another 300 workers. Telecom leaders Lucent and Nortel, which have already slashed more than half of their jobs, including hundreds at Massachusetts-based units, continue to miss sales targets and are expected to announce still more layoffs in coming weeks. Nortel last month said it would shut down a Wilmington optical telecom component business, CoreTek, which it bought for $1.2 billion two years ago, leaving 160 people out of work unless a buyer emerges for the CoreTek operations. "While it appears that job cuts in telecommunications are trending downward, we have been surprised in the past," Challenger said. "One month there are very few job cuts, and the next month there is a flood of cuts, which is to be expected in this volatile economy." Related story:
• Core adds to management team Core Networks has named Jeff Jarvis as its chief operating officer and Cynthia Villanueva as its director of marketing communications. The two come to Core Networks from Com21. The company also has moved its executive offices to California. • Keypoint Services joins Helius program Keypoint Services International Inc. has joined Helius Inc.'s Strategic Alliance Program. As part of the alliance, the companies will integrate products and services for the satellite communications industry. The alliance enables the companies to share sales leads and jointly market products. Keypoint is now an authorized reseller of Helius' products. • Eastern Broadband taps General Bandwidth Eastern Broadband Telecom has selected General Bandwidth as a primary vendor for its voice-over-IP deployment. General Bandwidth will supply its G6 platform. The platform, which is built on a carrier-class, fully redundant design, is a VoIP access and media gateway.
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