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TiVo To Be Acquired

May 9, 2016 by  
Filed under Around The Net

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Online entertainment company Rovi plans to purchase digital video recording firm TiVo for $1.1 billion in a stock and cash deal, the companies announced on Friday.

TiVo has cloud-based technology for integrating live, recorded, on-demand and Internet television into one user interface, with search, discovery, viewing and recording options from a variety of devices. Its technology has been deployed by operators including Virgin Media and Vodafone Spain.

Rovi announced in March that Sharp’s new Aquos TVs would include its G-Guide electronic programming guide.

The combined company is forecast to have more than $800 million in revenue in the current year. More than 10 million TiVo-served households are expected to be added to the current base of about 18 million homes that use Rovi guides. The new entity will serve nearly 500 service providers worldwide, the companies said.

The deal between Rovi and TiVo, besides creating a large media and entertainment technology company with complementary products and services, will also lead to the setting up of a company with a worldwide portfolio of more than 6,000 issued patents and pending applications worldwide.

The two companies have a strong licensing business and have also sued key players like  Comcast for patent infringement in the past. The companies said they have more than $3 billion in combined IP licensing revenue and past damage awards.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter and the combined company will use the TiVo name. Tom Carson, CEO of Rovi will be the chief executive of the new company.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/tivo-to-be-acquired-by-rovi.html

Panasonic Appears To Be On The Hunt

April 8, 2015 by  
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Japanese electronics giant Panasonic Corp said it is gearing up to spend 1 trillion yen ($8.4 billion) on acquisitions over the next four years, bolstered by a stronger profit outlook for its automotive and housing technology businesses.

Chief Executive Kazuhiro Tsuga said at a briefing on Thursday that Panasonic doesn’t have specific acquisition targets in mind for now. But he said the firm will spend around 200 billion yen on M&A in the fiscal year that kicks off in April alone, and pledged to improve on Panasonic’s patchy track record on big deals.

“With strategic investments, if there’s an opportunity to accelerate growth, you need funds. That’s the idea behind the 1 trillion yen figure,” he said. Tsuga has spearheaded a radical restructuring at the Osaka-based company that has made it one of the strongest turnaround stories in Japan’s embattled technology sector.

Tsuga previously told Reuters that company was interested in M&A deals in the European white goods market, a sector where Panasonic has comparatively low brand recognition.

The firm said on Thursday it’s targeting operating profit of 430 billion yen in the next fiscal year, up nearly 25 percent from the 350 billion yen it expects for the year ending March 31.

Panasonic’s earnings have been bolstered by moving faster than peers like Sony Corp and Sharp Corp to overhaul business models squeezed by competition from cheaper Asian rivals and caught flat-footed in a smartphone race led by Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics. Out has gone reliance on mass consumer goods like TVs and smartphones, and in has come a focus on areas like automotive technology and energy-efficient home appliances.

Tsuga also sought to ease concerns that an expensive acquisition could set back its finances, which took years to recover from the deal agreed in 2008 to buy cross-town rival Sanyo for a sum equal to about $9 billion at the time.

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Sony Decides Not To Sell

January 8, 2014 by  
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Japan’s Sony Corp has changed its mind and decided not to sell its lithium-ion battery unit.  Instead Sony has decided to take a chance at turning the business around with a weak yen and growing demand for smart phone batteries.

In addition to a weak yen, which can boost overseas earnings, the battery unit is also seeing increased demand for some of its new products, the Nikkei business daily reported.

For the past two years Sony had been planning to offload the unit, which was a pioneer in making lithium-ion batteries for computers and mobile devices but has struggled recently against cheaper South Korean rivals.

A government turnaround fund tried to broker a sale of the battery business to a Nissan Motor Co Ltd and NEC Corp joint venture earlier this year.

However, talks have stalled and Sony has now told the turnaround fund that it will hold on to the battery unit and develop it as a core business, the Nikkei reported, citing unidentified sources.

Sony, which last year sold its chemical business to the government turnaround fund, is trying to revive the fortunes of its consumer electronics business by focusing on cameras,gaming and mobile devices.

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Panasonic Drops Plasma

November 12, 2013 by  
Filed under Consumer Electronics

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Panasonic has announced it will discontinue production of plasma display panels (PDP) next month and close three factories that were building the HDTVs.

The company will stop selling plasma TVs for consumer use and PDP-related products for commercial use, such as Interactive Plasma Displays, with the current line of TVs. It expects to stop business operations at three of its display plants — the Amagasaki P3 Factory, the Amagasaki P5 Factory and the Amagasaki P4 Factory — by the end of March 2014.

Samsung and LG continue to produce plasma display televisions, but theirs are lower-end or entry-level models; they have generally put development dollars into LCD TVs, according to Paul Gray, a research analyst with NPD DisplaySearch.

“Samsung and [LG] were at best uncommitted to PDP,” Gray said in a blog post. And as for Panasonic, Gray said its “PDP research team had to counter every move in LCD and translate it to their technology…. Inevitably, they slowly lost ground.”

Since 2000, Panasonic has been the leading PDP maker. It led the global flat-panel display market by using PDP for large displays and LCD screens for small- and medium-sized displays. Only three years ago, Panasonic claimed 40% of the plasma display market.

In 2010, plasmaaccounted for 40% of flat panel TVs; this year, PDPs are expected to represent only 5% of the flat-panel market, according to according to market research firm NPD DisplaySearch.

Over the past two years, Panasonic has lost $15 billion through investments in flat-panel TV production, according to financial reports.

Plasma displays have increasingly lost market share to LCD TVs as they moved to LED backlights that narrowed the performance gap between the two technologies.

“With the rapid development of large-screen LCDs, and facing the severe price competition in the global market brought on by the Lehman Shock in September 2008, the company consolidated production in the Amagasaki P4 Factory, made a shift towards commercial applications and worked to improve the earnings of the business,” Panasonic said in a recent statement.

Panasonic will now focus its attention on “non-TV applications” and is moving to reduce its fixed costs for production of both plasma and LCD panels.

The move away from plasma HDTVs is reminiscent of the video tape wars of the 1970s and 1980s.

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LG Buys webOS From HP

March 6, 2013 by  
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Hewlett-Packard has sold some of the rights to its webOS mobile operating system to LG Electronics for use in smart TVs manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant.

LG has agreed to acquire the source code, webOS engineering team and other assets from HP, in a deal announced on Monday. LG will also license HP patents related to webOS and cloud technology, the companies said.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

HP acquired the mobile operating system, along with device maker Palm, in February 2010. HP used the OS on its short-lived TouchPad device, which debuted in mid-2011 then disappeared weeks later.

HP announced a new tablet, the US$169 Slate 7, on Sunday. The Slate 7 will run the Android operating system.

LG will lead the Open webOS and Enyo open-source projects as part of the deal, the company said. HP will retain ownership of all of Palm’s cloud computing assets, including source code, talent, infrastructure and contracts.

HP said it will also continue to support Palm users.

LG will use the technology to expand the Web capabilities of its smart TVs, said Sam Chang, LG vice president and general manager of innovation and Smart TV, in an interview.

LG bought the webOS assets in part for the engineering team, which includes user experience engineers, he said. The webOS engineers who remained at HP — the companies aren’t saying how many there are — are to join LG’s Silicon Valley labs.

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Broadcom Goes UltraHD

January 16, 2013 by  
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As TV manufacturers show off UltraHD TVs at CES, communications chip maker Broadcom is introducing the guts of future gateways that will be able to deliver video for those sets into viewers’ homes.

Broadcom’s BCM7445 silicon platform, announced just hours before the show opened on Tuesday morning, will be able to process incoming video from cable, carrier and satellite services that has four times the resolution of typical 1080p video offered today, according to the company.

Like the eye-catching but expensive TVs on the show floor in Las Vegas, the BCM7445 is just one of the first of many steps to consumers watching UltraHD shows at home. New content, displays and delivery technologies will all be required for the new resolution, which is also known as 4K.

Broadcom expects its chip to be in volume production by the middle of next year, in time for mainstream UltraHD TVs that will probably hit the market for the late 2014 holiday season, said Joe Del Rio, associate product line manager at Broadcom. However, service providers, which will probably be the distributors of most of the gateways built with the BCM7445, may take longer to start sending UltraHD video to their subscribers, Del Rio said.

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Google Sells A Piece Of Motorola

December 31, 2012 by  
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Google plans to unload the TV set-top box business of its Motorola Mobility subsidiary to Arris Group, a broadband device vendor, for $2.35 billion.

Arris will also receive patents belonging to the business, called Motorola Home, and will get a perpetual license to other Motorola Mobility patents as part of the deal. The companies announced their agreement late on Wednesday and expect the sale to close by the second quarter of next year.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in a closely examined deal that concluded in May. It bought the business primarily for its mobile assets and proceeded to seek a buyer for its Motorola Home division, which primarily makes set-top boxes for bringing video and other broadband services to TVs. Motorola Home had revenue of $3.4 billion in the year ending Sept. 30.

Despite the growth of Internet-based video services, Arris sees growth ahead in the set-top box business. The combined companies will have more than 500 customers in 70 countries, according to a press release.

“Every operator that we’ve talked to tells me that in-home devices are not going to go away,” Arris Chairman and CEO Bob Stanzione said on a conference call to discuss the deal. He sees a new generation of the boxes that will carry both traditional and IP (Internet Protocol) video services going into homes soon.

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Is Google Going Wireless?

November 26, 2012 by  
Filed under Smartphones

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They already sells phones and tablets, provides a wealth of online services and has been laying high-speed fiber to people’s homes. Now Google is apparently  weighing the possibility of a wireless network service as well.

Google has been in talks with satellite TV provider Dish Network over a possible partnership to build out a wireless service that would rival those from carriers such as AT&T and Sprint, the Wall Street Journal reported late last week.

The talks are at an early stage and could amount to nothing, and Google is just one of many companies Dish is talking to, according to the Journal, which cited anonymous sources. But it raises the prospect that Google might expand its business in a new direction.

Dish has been buying spectrum that could support a wireless service, although it still needs regulatory approval to set one up. In an interview with the Journal Thursday, CEO Charlie Ergen said the partners Dish is talking to include companies that don’t currently have a wireless business.

Google declined to comment on the report, the newspaper said.

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