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Exterity, which delivers an organisations’ TV and video content over a building, campus, or metropolitan-area IP network to TVs, PCs, and AV display equipment, believes that the Building IPTV market will continue to grow over the next 12 months.

The company carried out a survey of attendees at Integrated Systems Europe 2010 (ISE 2010), a trade event for professional AV and electronic systems integration.

More than a third of integrators, resellers and consultants surveyed at the event anticipated a significant growth in demand for Building IPTV solutions, while 88% thought that the Building IPTV market would grow in the coming year.

Those surveyed suggested that the key benefits of Building IPTV were ease of integration with existing infrastructure and ability to deliver a rapid return on investment,

The education sector was highlighted as a key area for the technology, along with corporate space and Government & Public Service.

Colin Farquhar, CEO, Exterity, said: “We have seen strong growth in sales over the past year, and the survey results show that momentum is building.

“Organisations are realising the benefits that Building IPTV can deliver and are looking to capitalise on these opportunities; End-user organisations can drive new revenue streams and achieve a rapid return on investment, whilst Systems Integrators can derive additional revenue streams through service support and selling additional services to their customers.

“It is also encouraging to see that the benefits of Building IPTV are being recognised by a wide range of industries, whether that be educational institutions, corporates or the public sector.”

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Website: Rapid TV News

Spain’s Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce will oblige TV sets from 21 inches up to integrate high definition tuners by a Royal Decree. The decree is in the preparation phase.

This Decree will also incorporate the standards for HDTV in Spain according to Francisco Ros, general secretary for Telecommunications and the Information Society.

Currently, some TV sets ready for Blu-ray connections are being sold but not all of them can receive the terrestrial HDTV signal with the maximum quality and they need an external tuner.

Finally the secretary pointed out the Audiovisual General Law allows the country’s autonomous regions to agree to broadcast their digital TV channels in each other’s territories, something that’s already been happening for years in the case of analogue television.

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Website: Rapid TV News

Andrew Sukawaty, CEO at Inmarsat, says the satellite operator is looking at its 5th Generation plans, and is considering L-Band and Ka-band for investment.

“We really should be shot as a management team if we weren’t looking at this,” Sukawaty told Space News, a specialist trade newspaper.

“But we have made no decisions. We need to consider spectrum availability, orbital slots in geostationary orbit, a whole host of factors. Everything is on the table.”

Inmarsat has sent out a Request For Proposals to satellite manufacturers and has asked that they evaluate a fifth-generation satellite system.

Inmarsat is already using 4th Generation birds, and the oldest was launched in 2005 which means the fleet is good until about 2020 without need for replacement.

Inmarsat is also looking at an S-Band craft in order to exploit frequencies granted to Inmarsat by the EU.

(Solaris Mobile is also using a portion of the S-Band under a similar EU license).

However, Sukawaty says Inmarsat wants further clarification of the EU licensing system, and ideally would want a co-investing partner for S-Band.

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Website: Rapid TV News
Russian pay-TV platform NTV+ is to carry the Russian CIS states’ national channels.

Subscribers will have to pay a “nominal” 50 Roubles (about $1.60) to watch the channels.

BBC Monitoring reports that Russian Federation Minister of Telecoms and Mass Communications Igor Shchegolev said at a meeting with the Russian president dedicated to CIS countries’ media presence in Russia on March 10: “The issue of distributing CIS member states’ national TV signals in Russia has been thoroughly studied.

The best solution will be to place these channels on the NTV Plus satellite platform.”

He also added that talks with CIS partners had already been held in order to understand how interested they were in broadcasting over Russia.

Shchegolev added that much had been done by Gazprom Media holding company which had rented additional satellite capacity.

For its part, Gazprom Media general director Nikolay Senkevich said that the holding company “had made a decision not only to provide the NTV Plus platform to CIS TV broadcasters, but to do it at its own expense”. “For national broadcasters it will be free,” he explained.

Senkevich added that new potential NTV Plus subscribers would be able to watch national TV channels “for a symbolic payment of R50 if they chose to.

“All a potential subscriber will need is to install NTV Plus and to get a contract for a particular channel they are interested in,” Senkevich said.

He mentioned that new subscribers interested in watching CIS national channels would not necessarily need to connect to an NTV Plus basic package.

However, additional discounts on such TV channel packages will be made for them.

Sergey Sitnikov, head of the Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, said at the meeting that it would be as easy as possible for CIS national TV companies to get a licence for broadcasting in Russia.

“The procedure is quite easily done. One has to register a media outlet in the Russian Federation and get a licence. It will not take long,” he said.

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Website: Rapid TV News

Dish Mexico is a j-v between Echostar and MVS Telecommunications, and is seeking to acquire rival SatMex. Dish Mexico’s latest numbers are just out.

Dish Mexico achieved 478,000 subs, as at Dec 31.

While this might be seen as a perfectly acceptable result for a business that went live only a little over a year ago, the actual numbers are significantly less than the company set itself for its first year’s target.

Ernesto Vargas, head of MVS, had stated that the company would achieve one million users by the end of 2009.

According to figures disclosed by Mexico’s Federal Telecommunications Commission, the country closed 2009 with 2.3 million DTH users, that is a 51.8% growth if compared with 2008.

Sky, the Televisa Group’s subsidiary, whose services are targeted to the low income sector, achieved 79% of the DTH market, and accounted for 1.8 million subscribers.

One of Dish Mexico’s positioning strategies, according to NexTVLatam, was the low cost package targeted at the lower income sector.

Telmex executed a service billing, collection and distribution agreement with Dish and recognized the possibility of becoming a DTH project investor.

In its report the Federal Telecommunications Commission mentions that the cable TV segment recorded a 5.7% growth over the last quarter of 2009, adding 5,042 subscribers (the lowest growth rate since 2003).

On the other hand, the number of MMDS users showed a 29.8% fall, to 488,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

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Samsung’s latest range of TVs will go on sale in the US at the end of March. Indeed, some models are already available, and will be in key European markets very shortly. We know their prices, and the 3D sets will not be cheap.

Samsung’s debut into the 3D set market is its range of UNC7000 models which are already being discounted by Amazon at around $2339 for the 46” model and $2969 for the 55” which suggests that buyers are paying just $250 extra over the ‘non-3D’ models.

Broadcasting of any sort of 3D signals is still some months away, so Samsung has handily bundled in an offer which includes a Samsung 3D Blu-ray player and a pair of active shutter glasses.

Panasonic has also released its 3D plans, using Best Buy in the US as its prime retailer and charging $2500 for a 50” set, or $2900 when a 3D Blu-ray player and glasses are included.

In other words 3D prices, at least for US buyers, are not too outrageous, and significantly less than early HDTV models. And most analysts expect these introductory prices to quickly fall as quantities – and competition – increases.

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Owners of the Humax Foxsat HD and the Foxsat HDR Freesat set top boxes will be able to access the highly desirable BBC iPlayer through the red button on the remote control.

However before the viewer can use this service a little bit of planning will be needed, as the set top box needs to be connected to the home broadband router via an Ethernet connection.

This is easy if the router is near the TV and set top box.

When a network connection is made the viewer simply has to press the red button and select the BBC iPlayer from the menu.

This is good feature, allowing the viewer to access the BBC iPlayer without the need for a computer and allowing them to watch the catch up TV service in the main television screen.

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Sharp will be releasing the first versions of its new Freeview HD set top boxes towards the end of April.

Naturally, one of these machines will be a personal video recorder (PVR) but unusually it will offer a USB port as an additional storage connection.

The Sharp TU T1UR, which comes with three USB ports, allows the consumer to connect external hard drives, flash drives and SD card adapters into the unit.

However, it seems that it will not playback content that has been loaded from a computer, making movie downloads slightly awkward to watch.

The set top boxes connect to either HD Ready or standard definition television via the HDMI or SCART ports.

The PVR unit comes with an eight day electronic programme guide (EPG), allowing the user the record, pause and rewind live TV.

There is no word on pricing so far.

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