Hasta La Gadget!

Some British cable subscribers will soon have a new master: international telecom giant Liberty Global has just acquired Virgin Media for $23.3 billion in cash and stock. The deal gives Liberty an even larger stake in Europe than it had before and, if you believe the new partners, creates one of the bigger broadband companies on the planet at 47 million homes covered across 14 countries. Liberty also sees Virgin as good at tackling the business and mobile spaces that have been its relative weak points. How this will affect the UK isn’t immediately apparent, although Virgin Media will continue to run under its existing name — that moebius logo isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future. We’ll at least have some room to ponder the consequences when the buyout isn’t poised to close until sometime in the second quarter.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Liberty Global (PDF)

Cuba may only be positioned 100 or so miles from Key West, but the US embargo meant an undersea fiber link to North America hasn’t been a possibility. Earlier this week, though, we began to see discussion regarding traffic passing through a connection to Venezuela, and ETECSA, a government-owned telecom provider, has now confirmed that a 994-mile cable has been operational since August, though in a limited capacity. On January 10th, ETECSA stepped up its utilization, testing the connection using “real traffic.”

The $70-million Alba-1 cable, which has a reported lifespan of 25 years, was completed in February 2011, though it’s not clear when, or if, citizens will see any benefit — a statement explained that it “will not automatically mean an increase in access.” That’s not great news for Cubans, but at least Hugo Chavez now has the possibility of a direct link to his home country — with a Netflix subscription and a VPN tunnel to the good ole US of A, his recovery could be a little more speedy.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: AFP

Reuters is chiming in this evening with word that Canadian telco Rogers is ready to spend $710 million ($700 million in Canuck cash) to buy Mountain Cablevision Limited and license wireless spectrum from cable giant Shaw Communications. If Rogers sees fit, it can even buy up spectrum licenses from Shaw in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northern Ontario and Saskatchewan thanks to the deal. Cable channel TVtropolis, which is jointly owned by Shaw and Rogers, will see the remainder of its Rogers-owned stake bought up by Shaw for roughly 59 million Canadian dollars. There’s no word on when the deals will be finalized, but you can expect to hear Rogers and Shaw give themselves hearty pats on the back when they get rubber-stamped.

Update: Eagle-eyed commenters have pointed out that it’s Shaw which will buy the remaining steak in TVtropolis it doesn’t own, not Rogers. We’ve updated the post accordingly.

Filed under: Mobile

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Source: Reuters

Pre-CES rumors suggested Intel would announce a “virtual cable” service (before being stamped out) but the partnership with Comcast it actually revealed turned out to be far more conventional. Very similar to the tru2way multiroom box Intel demonstrated back at IDF in 2009, the Multi-Screen Video Gateway by Arris capitalizes on DLNA standards — touted by the alliance earlier today — to bring video to virtually any device in your home. It’s “headless”, because it’s not built to connect directly to any TV, just shoved somewhere out of sight while you tune in on your various screens. Of course, these demos have been here before and the DTCP-IP technology behind it isn’t particularly new either, so why could 2013 finally be the year we see these features roll out from major providers?

As cited in the earlier press release, DirecTV has released Genie DVRs loaded with RVU that pushes video directly to TVs and even the PS3 in the past year, providing one example of the tech in action. The updated FCC IP interface requirements and continued work on the DLNA Premium Content guidelines are also forcing progress forward, albeit slowly. Finally, there’s some hope that the CE and cable industry can actually work together, as seen in Comcast’s RDK program that’s pushing the development of this box and others (like that Humax box we spotted floating through the FCC) with similar capabilities. The box was running Comcast’s new X1 cloud-based guide which has seen a limited rollout so far, but because of how it works is more easily accessed and updated on connected devices. Of course even with all that, we’ve been down this road before (again and again and again and again) so despite a slick demo we’ll withhold excitement until hardware is actually released.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Intel

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Variety reports that one of Sony’s big fish announcements this year will be a broadband TV service that’ll compete directly with cable. The TV service will offer multiple channels licensed from different content companies and will stream over the Internet. Meaning there would be no more need for cable. Meaning awesome. More »