Vonage agreed to buy privately held SimpleSignal for $25.25 million, said a Vonage news release Monday. SimpleSignal provides unified communications as a service and collaboration solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses. The purchase price is about 1.5 times the estimated 2015 SimpleSignal revenue, said Vonage.
Cablevision and HBO reached an agreement that will give the cable operator's Optimum Online customers access to the channel's stand-alone streaming service, HBO Now, via the Internet, said a news release from Cablevision. It said the deal makes Optimum the first cable provider to partner with HBO on the service, which is expected to launch in April (see 1503090035).
HBO Now, HBO’s stand-alone offering, is a Comcast competitor, TDG Research analyst Alan Wolk said in a note Thursday. HBO Now is suited for cord-nevers and cord cutters, he said. Comcast hopes its customers will use X1 and X2 set-tops, while other multichannel video programming distributors could shift to a bring-your-own-device system, he said. Set-top boxes are dated, difficult to update and unreliable, he said. Customers could buy Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV or Roku and MVPDs could provide an app, he said. Operators could instead offer branded devices and make customers install and maintain them, he said. “This would take the onus to provide STBs off the operator” and allow more frequent updates, Wolk said. Comcast wants to control its interface and “create a standard for the industry,” selling X1 and X2 to peers, he said. The set-top could include streaming services, like Amazon or Netflix, he said. Pay-TV subscribers who have HBO Go have “the best of both worlds” with HBO live through set-tops and on-demand through an app, he said. HBO Go is available on mobile and in-home connected devices at no extra charge, he said. MVPDs shouldn’t worry about HBO-subscribing customers deserting them, he said. To keep HBO customers, MVPDs can offer a lower package price, add 10 MB of Internet speed for free or give two free years of HBO for renewals, he said.
Eight in 10 U.S. households have at least one HDTV set, and 52 percent have multiple HDTVs, according to data from Leichtman Research Group. LRG said the multiple figure is up from 46 percent five years ago. The budding Ultra HD TV market is at 1.6 percent U.S. household penetration, analyst Bruce Leichtman told us. Of the tiny percentage of 4K TV owners, 85 percent reported having an "excellent" experience with the TV and none rated the experience as poor, Leichtman said. Awareness of 4K Ultra HD TV is on the rise at 41 percent, versus 30 percent last year, and 26 percent of those who have seen 4K TV expressed interest in getting one, versus 6 percent who had not seen it, Leichtman said. Of the consumers who bought any TV last year, 38 percent reported having an Internet-connected model. Overall, about 11 percent of all smart TVs in the U.S. are Internet-connected, LRG said. Of the single-HDTV households, 89 percent subscribe to a pay-TV service; but the percentage expands to 91 percent in multi-HDTV homes, LRG said. Roughly a quarter of U.S. households purchased a TV in the past 12 months, mirroring a 20 percent or higher trend in place for the past 11 years, Leichtman said. “While HDTV now seems commonplace in the U.S., much of the growth of HD has come in recent years,” Leichtman said, as more than a third of households have bought their first HDTV in the past five years. The phone survey of 1,231 adults in the continental U.S. was conducted in January and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.
Streaming audio increased 41 percent in January from the year-ago month in average active sessions (AAS), said Triton Digital in listing top-performing digital audio stations and networks measured by the Webcast Metrics platform, in a news release Thursday. Thirty-six percent of all audio streaming listening happened on iOS, 30 percent on Android, 9 percent on Flash Player and 8 percent on Google Chrome, Triton said. Android and iOS remain the favored platforms for streaming audio, it said. In the top 20 markets, Denver experienced the largest listening gain compared with December, with a 33 percent increase in AAS, it said. The next markets with listening gains were Tampa with 26 percent, Chicago with 21 percent, New York with 21 percent and San Francisco with 20 percent, the industry researcher said.
Yahoo expanded its relationship with Disney/ABC Television Group, and Disney/ABC content will be featured on Yahoo, the Internet company said in a news release Thursday. Clips from Disney/ABC will be available on Yahoo Screen and Yahoo TV, it said. The daily Yahoo Your Day series with Yahoo editors will launch on Good Morning America March 16, it said. Yahoo News and ABC News will also collaborate further on major news events, including the 2016 presidential election, Yahoo said. ABC News will distribute content from Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, it said.
Job postings on the Nest website raised speculation in the audio industry about a possible new, formidable contender for Sonos in the wireless audio space. TechCrunch first reported that the Google-owned company, known for its upstart smart thermostat, has listed a “head of audio” position in its Careers section. The job description reads: “Nest is looking for a highly technical Head of Audio to lead the development of Nest Audio across hardware and software, present and future.” The job would involve leading the “Nest Audio team," including acoustics, audio electronics, audio software, and audio test and validation for all Nest products, the listing said, and developing "an audio roadmap for Nest products," including hardware and software supporting “delightful user experiences and innovative features.” An additional position we saw listed Wednesday describes an “acoustics design engineer” to be tasked with component selection, acoustic design, integration, debugging and testing. “This individual will build an audio design team to support audio needs across all Nest products,” the job description said. The time is right for emerging multiroom audio products, according to data from IHS Technology. IHS analyst Paul Erickson said that network-connected multiroom speaker systems are “the small-but-growing subcategory to watch." Major companies including Bose, Denon, DTS, LG, Qualcomm, Samsung and Sony "are all entering the market with products or platforms designed to take on a rapidly growing segment initially popularized by Sonos,” Erickson said. The wireless speaker market is being fueled by growth in sales of tablets and smartphones and a shift in consumer media consumption preferences toward streaming services including Deezer, Pandora and Spotify, Erickson said. “Consumers are seeking ways to wirelessly play audio from their mobile devices on speakers in the room they’re in, in multiple rooms in a household, and on speakers carried with them while on the go," he said. The trend will drive "strong global growth in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connected speakers over the next few years," he said. When Sonos launched 13 years ago, “we made an informed bet that streaming would go mainstream, and that there would be thousands of services bringing music to millions of people all over the world," a spokesman said. Sonos is “more focused than ever on delivering the best possible experience for music lovers in the ever-evolving digital age,” he said, adding there’s never been a better time “to be a great hardware and software company.”
International Data Corp. scaled back its five-year forecast for the tablet category, the research firm said Thursday. Worldwide shipments are expected to reach 234.5 million units this year, a "modest” year-over-year increase of 2.1 percent, IDC said. The researcher expects “low but positive growth” for the market in coming years on demand from the commercial sector and as “Microsoft slowly gains a foothold.” While phablets are becoming more popular, a portion of the consumer market still wants customization options of a larger screen size, analyst Jitesh Ubrani said. Vendors are cutting prices on smaller tablets and adopting features such as voice calling to compete against phablets, Ubrani said. Android will continue as platform leader with a two-thirds share of the tablet market over the forecast period, IDC said. It called iOS the “weakest link” in the category with share expected to decline this year to levels beneath those of the past three years. Windows is expected to gain “significant share” over the forecast period, growing from 5.1 percent last year to 14.1 percent in 2019, IDC said. "Microsoft is doing a lot of good things right now,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, IDC research director-tablets. The launch of Windows 10 later this year will boost Microsoft’s share and affect the industry as a whole, Bouchard said. "There is an appetite for a platform that can provide a productivity experience that remains consistent across multiple form factors and device types,” and Microsoft is "well positioned to capture some of that demand,” he said.
Silicon Labs said Thursday it's partnering with ARM to define and deliver power management APIs (application programming interfaces) for ARM mbed platforms. Power management will enable energy efficiency solutions for ultra-low-power, battery-operated connected devices, the companies said. A feature in the APIs automatically determines and enables the optimal sleep mode based on the microcontroller (MCU) peripherals in use, which can significantly reduce power consumption, they said. Low-energy optimization is achieved by enabling input/output operations to be executed in the background and by allowing the operations to continue even while the MCU core is in sleep mode or during other processing tasks, they said. The mbed platform will play a key role in accelerating the deployment of “countless battery-powered IoT applications," said Daniel Cooley, general manager-Silicon Labs MCU and wireless products.
Correction: The type of people who revenge porn lawyer Carrie Goldberg said are infrequently arrested on child porn charges are the victims of revenge porn (see 1503110044).