Frontier Communications' struggles with the FiOS TV offering it inherited from Verizon when it bought the telco's landline business in Oregon, Washington and Indiana continues. The ILEC has rolled out a series of new "simplified" and "customer-friendly" pricing plans designed to convince current customers it plans to keep the service. Article

Video encoding specialist Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT), which earlier this year rolled out its ProMedia software suite to build on the booming video market, has been selected to power the HD and SD video for Tennessee's Ben Lomand Telephone Cooperative.

The telco offers advanced Voice, Broadband and digital video services--a 200-channel HD and SD offering--to residential and business customers in Middle Tennessee and the Upper Cumberland.

Ben Lomand will use Harmonic's widely deployed ProStream 1000 with ACE high-density, real-time transcoder to power the service, enabling "any-to-any, any-to-many" support for HD and SD, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video and audio transcoding of up to 20 HD or 60 SD channels, as well as ASI to IP multiplexing, in a one rack unit (1 RU) chassis. The platform will enables Ben Lomand to meet growing demand for digital TV services, while lowering capital and operating expenses through reduced power consumption and rack space.

The ProStream 1000 with ACE currently is supporting more than 18,000 channels worldwide. In addition to its transcoding performance, the ProStream 1000 advanced stream processing core includes enhanced multiplexing and scrambling capabilities.

For more:
- see this release

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Smart TV app publisher Flingo has scored $7 million in a Series A funding round led by August Capital. The company said the money will be used to help it expand it device footprint--it's already available on smart TVs and devices from Samsung, LG, Vizio, Sanyo, Insignia, Western Digital and Netgear. 

Perhaps more importantly, the funding will help Flingo refine its automatic content recognition infrastructure, which identifies thousands of broadcast network programs around the world in real-time. That means content providers and operators will be able to send contextually relevant content directly to the viewer's TV, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

As part of the funding deal, August Capital's David Marquardt, who's also a board member of Microsoft, and Howard Hartenbaum, a founding investor in Skype, will join Flingo's board of directors.

Flingo recently launched a Social TV framework that enables one-click sharing to Twitter and Facebook from broadcast TV. That feature will soon be available on a variety of A&E channels.

"Flingo has the potential to build a very large business enabling new experiences around broadcast television," said Marquardt. "The company already has gained strong traction with the top names in TV programming, consumer electronics and digital media. We're excited to be a part of the team."

For more:
- see this release

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Blonder Tongue Laboratories has acquired R.L. Drake for $6.5 million is an all-cash deal. The two companies make signal processing and distribution equipment for the pay-TV industry. Certain adjustments based upon a post-closing audit of the balance sheet of R.L. Drake and other payments over the next three years could add an additional $1.5 million to the price.

R.L. Drake, which had net sales of $10 million in 2011, delivers electronic communications solutions for cable television systems, digital television reception, video signal distribution and digital video encoding.

Blonder Tongue said companies will continue to operate separate entities in two locations, Blonder Tongue in Old Bridge, N.J., and R.L. Drake in Franklin, Ohio.

Blonder Tongue provides system operators and integrators serving the cable, broadcast, satellite, IPTV, institutional and professional video markets with solutions for the provision of content contribution, distribution and video delivery to homes and businesses.

Blonder Tongue Chief Executive James Luksch said the deal would allow the companies to "maximizing synergies" in its engineering, manufacturing and marketing teams, giving customers "new and innovative products delivered to market faster and more affordably."

"A void has developed in the CATV industry leaving even the largest cable MSO's searching for companies capable of developing and delivering innovative new products," he said. "Blonder Tongue and Drake plan to fill that void by shortening the development and manufacturing cycle to deliver the most complete compliment of business and product solutions in our industry."

Blonder Tongue in November reported its Q3 sales were about $7 million, down from $9.2 million a year earlier. It reported losses of $50,000 for the quarter, 1 cent per share, compared to profits of $721,000, or 12 cents per share a year earlier. The company at the time blamed a stuttering U.S. economy, but said it's high-definition encoder business has increased substantially, adding that it likely would grow with the roll out of additional versions with alternative feature sets in the coming months.

The company also has a strong position through its Edge QAM product in the digital-free-to-guest segment of the hospitality market.

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- see this release

Related article:
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Multi-screen content consumption is hitting the mainstream and CE manufacturers are fully on board, according to new research that forecasts the number of IP-enabled consumer electronics devices shipped will approach 2.5 billion this year and rise to 3.5 billion in 2015.

IMS Research also said shipments of residential data modems and gateways will reach 135 million in 2012, as the "concept of convergence within the home is gaining momentum in terms of deployment of actual solutions and consumers' usage of these solutions."

"For example, the multi-room DVR deployments enabled by the DLNA Premium Video protocol suite, demonstrate one of the first converged home media architectures where a primary server device distributes content to thin clients around the home," said Anna Hunt, principal analyst at IMS Research.

IMS said the increasing adoption of fixed broadband connectivity into homes, along with the proliferation of wired and wireless home networking, also was driving the transition forward.

Other key factors include a growing installed base of IP-enabled CE devices, increased understanding of how to secure content distribution in iOS and Android applications, open-standard encryption protocols such as DLNA Premium Video (DTCP-IP) and new content distribution contracts that specifically allow for multi-screen distribution.

IMS also highlighted hardware innovations, such as adaptive transcoding and ultra-high-bandwidth modems.

Previous attempts to implement (multi-screen ecosystems) have provided a sub-par user experience," says Stephen Froehlich, senior analyst at IMS Research. "However, 2012 will be the year that this all changes. Numerous vendors at this year's CES, for instance, demonstrated products which showed real, highly complex, incredibly powerful and scalable solutions to the incredibly difficult problem of delivering a converged, multi-screen television experience."

Froehlich said smartphones and tablets will become increasingly important in the ecosystem as wireless technologies evolve to seamlessly share content.

"Service providers are focusing on evolving their strategies to encompass the multiple devices and screens used by consumers in the consumption of advanced broadband services," he said.

For more:
- see this release

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