Nearly 3,500 households in neighborhoods surrounding Bell Shoals Road can now order the fastest Internet access available and sparklingly clear TV pictures as Verizon announced the first availability of its FiOS fiber-powered Internet, TV and voice offerings in the area. The triple-play bundles are delivered over Verizon's all-fiber network, directly to people's homes and businesses.

As Verizon completes the necessary construction and engineering activities, it expects to extend FiOS service by year-end to 1,000 more households for a total of 4,500 households in proximity of Bell Shoals Road, including Bloomingdale and Lithia.

comScore releases its Video Metrix report for September 2007, revealing that nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched a video online (including both streaming video and progressive downloads), averaging three hours of video per person during the month. Google Sites, which includes YouTube.com, topped the September rankings with both the most unique video viewers and most videos viewed.

Google Continues to Lead Online Video Market

September saw Americans view more than 9 billion videos online, with Google Sites once again ranking as the top U.S. video property with 2.6 billion videos viewed (28.3 percent share of videos), 2.5 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com (27.6 percent). Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 387 million (4.2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 381 million (4.1 percent) and Viacom Digital with 304 million (3.3 percent).

Brightcove has entered into a company-wide agreement with Channel 4 allowing the broadcaster to incorporate video content across all of its online properties. The first Channel 4 site to launch video content with Brightcove is its new online promotional destination "TV Clips," featuring clips from current TV programmes, an archive of the best moments from Channel 4's 25 years of broadcasting, and a preview of new programming coming to Channel 4.

Recognised as one of the industry's most innovative broadcasters, Channel 4 will use the Brightcove Internet TV platform to distribute online video clips to help drive Internet users to watch full-length programme content via Channels 4's linear transmissions, its 4oD on demand site or by purchasing a DVD.

Nighthawk Systems has initiated shipments of its MediaPro IP3000HD video set-top box units to a leading hospitality services provider, and expects to continue making regular shipments to the customer throughout the remainder of 2007. These shipments allow Nighthawk to begin recognizing revenues from the recently-acquired set-top box operation. Nighthawk had previously disclosed that it had assumed a backlog of approximately $400,000 in orders for the units when it acquired the IPTV set-top box operations of Eagle Broadband in October, and had received an additional order for approximately $480,000 of the units subsequent to making the acquisition.

Espial and Avail Media announce the signing of a sales agreement and strategic partnership. According to the terms of the deal, Avail Media will resell Espial's Evo IPTV Service Platform to small and mid-sized operators in the North American market. The partners also intend to jointly develop and share revenues for a range of new and differentiating IPTV applications that will leverage the strengths of their respective technologies. In addition, Avail Media revealed that nine North American service provider customers have already selected Espial's Evo IPTV Service Platform as their middleware, pre-integrated with Avail Media's managed video content services.

CBS RADIO’s vast portfolio of websites will gain access to a host of new searchable video content through a partnership with AOL’s Truveo. As part of the partnership, more than 35 CBS RADIO stations spanning several different formats and markets across the country have integrated Truveo’s video search engine online with more scheduled to launch in the coming weeks.

Limelight has been selected as the exclusive CDN provider to deliver video content for all 17 of Dailymotion's growing portfolio of localised, country-specific online portals. Dailymotion needed a trusted partner that could help support its in-house content distribution infrastructure. Dailymotion has been experiencing exponential growth, in terms of site traffic, content volume and general brand awareness. In June 2007, Dailymotion drew 37.6 million users who viewed a total of 715 million online videos.

Following landmark Black Friday promotions through major retail chains, the North American HD DVD Promotional Group announces that sales of dedicated HD DVD players exceeded the 750,000 mark. The data is based on retailer reports and other point of sale data, and includes standalone set-top players as well as the Xbox 360 HD DVD player.

"HD DVD continues to gain momentum and market share with consumers," said Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of HD strategic marketing for Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and co-president of the HD DVD Promotional Group. "With more than four weeks left for holiday shopping, HD DVD is turning out to be a perfect consumer electronics gift."

Houston-area customers now have access to a suite of new AT&T U-verse IPTV features that further differentiate the service from cable. The new interactive features — available to customers at no extra charge — include:

• AT&T U-bar, which brings customizable weather, stock, sports and traffic information to the TV screen. Customers who also subscribe to AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet have the option to personalize the U-bar from their AT&T Yahoo! home page to display weather at a specified location, their personal stock portfolio and scores for their favorite sports teams.
• YELLOWPAGES.COM TV, an intuitive new way to search for local businesses and other information via AT&T U-verse TV.
• AT&T Yahoo! Games, available over the television screen, including Sudoku, Solitaire, JT's Blocks, Mah-jongg Tiles, and Chess.

TiVo and NBC Universal have entered into a multi-year strategic partnership to leverage the strong content brands of NBCU with the unique advertising, promotional and audience research capabilities enabled by TiVo DVRs. As part of the agreement, NBC Universal’s 14 television networks and 10 NBC owned-and-operated TV stations will be able to sell TiVo Interactive Tags in combination with other NBC products and will subscribe to TiVo’s Stop||Watch second-by-second commercial ratings service. The announcement was made today by Tom Rogers, President and CEO, TiVo and Mike Pilot, President, NBC Universal Sales and Marketing.

Irish telecoms provider Smart Telecom has selected Verimatrix to secure its advanced interactive and Video-on-Demand service in Ireland, called Smart Vision. The Verimatrix Video Content Authority System enables Smart Telecom to deliver secure, premium content throughout its digital video network.

Dublin-based Smart Telecom is a progressive operator in the Irish market that has built a next generation Carrier Ethernet network to offer triple play services – digital television, broadband and telephone. Its recent €2.5 million investment in IPTV will enable Smart Telecom to offer Smart Vision with more than 100 television and radio channels to 550,000 homes in Ireland. Based on figures from analyst firm Screen Digest, the European IPTV market is set to double in subscriptions from 2.9 million in 2006 to 5.6 million during 2007.

Developing a successful value-added service business is essential for future revenue growth for wireline operators. Of such services IPTV is currently one of the biggest opportunities, as it not only opens up the broadcast TV market to telecoms operators but also a whole realm of possibilities around interactive video services and applications, as well as adjacent opportunities such as advertising. IPTV has consequently become one of the most discussed topics in the consumer telecoms space over the past 12 months. This report highlights the major tends, opportunities, issues and threats faced by operators moving into this industry.

BitBand has been selected to supply its IPTV video servers to Connexion Technologies. Through the agreement, BitBand Technologies will help Connexion Technologies provide multi-dwelling residences and communities with advanced entertainment packages delivered over a single Fiber to the Home network.

Connexion Technologies deploys fiber-optic infrastructures for properties in the US. The company designs, installs and operates the networks and provides a one-stop-shop for real estate developers and communities. Utilizing BitBand's solution allows Connexion Technologies to enable and immediately deploy on-demand IPTV applications and business models.

On2 Technologies inks an extensive agreement with Texas Instruments, under which the two companies will collaborate on technology to implement On2's industry leading TrueMotion VP6 and VP7 video compression formats on TI's industry leading OMAP Platform and DaVinci technology for mobile handsets and digital video applications.

Under their agreement, the two companies will share technology and development resources allowing TI to optimize VP6 and VP7 codec performance for different applications with TI's development partners and community. Earlier this year, On2 became a TI development partner, further extending the availability of VP6 and VP7 codecs to TI's development community.

Visioneering and DigiLink announce the availability of a hardware and software developer kit that allows digital media equipment manufacturers to rapidly develop IPTV applications for multimedia content owners, aggregators and content suppliers. The new kit utilizes world class audio and video codecs, a standards compliant file container, network and graphic user interface libraries, a Linux operating system and device drivers, and sample applications with code. The combination of Visioneering's Sonata set-top box, DigiLink's rich software capabilities and Texas Instruments Incorporated's DaVinci technology allows IPTV designers to quickly develop cost-effective solutions to match their growing markets needs.