Blog articles from 10/2008

Continua Health Alliance, a consortium for advancing technology adoption in the healthcare industry, announced this past Tuesday that Dossia and Google are joining the organization. For those who are not familiar with Dossia, it is a consortium made of many large self-insured employers and devoted to create personal health records (PHR) for their employees. Its members include AT&T, Wal-Mart, Cardinal Health, Intel, BP, Applied Materials, etc. Google, as we all know, introduced its...

Samsung's been busy this month. I just caught this press release from October 15 where Samsung and DivX announced a multiyear agreement to add high-quality DivX® video playback to a number of Samsung digital television models. The DivX Certified Samsung devices are expected to be available in worldwide markets beginning in early 2009, and will be able to playback DivX media files directly via USB slots or via Ethernet connection certified by DLNA.

I found a couple of interesting data points on the European cable TV and broadband markets today: Cable Europe reports that digital cable subscribers in Europe grew 18% to 16.3 million in the first half of 2008. Germany leads the way with digital cable subscribers, at 3.4 million subscribers. Numericable , the French cable operator that emerged in 2007 as the combination of assets from France Telecom and TDF and Noos (formerly UPC France), now has more than 100,000...

German pay-TV broadcaster Premiere’s shares fell 60 per cent as it announced losses, a subscriber number re-statement and revealed it is trying to restructure bank debt. "As a result of the EBITDA outlook, Premiere has commenced discussions with its banks regarding a restructuring of debt facilities and is confident to reach an agreement," it said. The company said it was satisfied with the way the talks were proceeding and did not plan a capital increase. "We...

Bringing Internet video directly to the TV via network-connected consumer electronics devices is a big trend that we discussed in our report Internet Video: Direct-to-Consumer Services (Second Edition). I'll be discussing this and other Internet video trends in a Webcast this afternoon, as well. We now have a couple of new news items that reflect this trend. First, you had to think that this announcement was coming. LG Electronics' BD300 Network Blu-ray Disc Player can connect to...

This could be a hint of what TV-based social networking features could be coming to a screen near you soon. CBS Interactive is creating "social viewing rooms," an online feature that allows groups of viewers to collectively watch and interact with streaming TV content. The service combines elements of a chat room, video conferencing and standard live streaming to give fans a more communal experience when watching the network's content online. On CBS.com, a group of friends...

Today, Motorola launched its remote device management for its IPTV set-tops. Motorola’s NBBS device management system will now enable service providers to accelerate the delivery of personal media experiences with new services, improved customer satisfaction and lower operational costs with fewer truck rolls. NBBS helps eliminate provisioning errors and customer frustration by automating the provisioning and management process for a wide range of devices with easy, zero-touch...

Parks Associates is supporting the Storage Visions event again this year. For information on research on storage, please check out our new report: Home Servers and Consumer Storage: Analysis and Forecasts Storage Visions is the two days before the International CES at the Flamingo Hotel. Storage Visions is where you can find out about the technologies that will lead to economic recovery. Storage Visions has speakers from leaders and analysts in the industry including Keynote Talks...