Our take: Is Macromedia looking to make a run against Windows Media Player, Apple's QuickTime, Nullsoft's Winamp, and RealPlayer with their release of Flash Player 8?

New runtime offers breakthrough performance and real-time expressiveness for rich media, communications, and applications

Macromedia, Inc. today announced the availability of a public beta for Macromedia Flash Player 8, the next-generation Flash Player client runtime. Flash Player is a high performance, lightweight, expressive runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones, and devices. Flash Player 8 offers dramatically enhanced expressive capabilities, a new advanced text-rendering engine, a powerful new video codec, 8-bit alpha channel video, and improvements to performance and security. Installed on over 600 million Internet-connected desktops and mobile devices, Flash Player serves as the backbone of the Flash Platform, enabling organizations and individuals to deliver great digital experiences.

On2 Technologies, Inc., announced that Macromedia, Inc. has completed integration of On2's award-winning VP6 compression technology into its family of Macromedia Flash Player 8 products -- announced earlier today. Macromedia's adoption of the VP6 codec will enable hundreds of millions of Internet users to experience the quality and feature-rich capabilities of On2's industry-leading video compression technology.

OmniReach Fiber Distribution Terminals Designed to Support IP Video Services in FTTX Networks

ADC, a leading supplier of infrastructure solutions for fiber-to-the-x (FTTX) networks, announced that CC Communications of Fallon, Nev., has installed OmniReach(TM) Fiber Distribution Terminals (FDT) for its passive optical network (PON).

UTStarcom, Inc., a global leader in IP-based, end-to-end networking solutions and services, announced that the company provided its mVision end-to-end IPTV solution for a recently completed trial of triple play services in Brazil with Telemar, which will make IP-based television and multimedia services available to its customers utilizing the IP protocol. Today, Telemar offers 15 million fixed lines of telephony service, 8.1 million cellular lines and almost 700,000 Internet lines to the Brazilian market.

Again, we've made a lot of changes to the Internet TV station listing that we're pleased to announce. The most prominent is that we now support sites utilizing Winamp as their only video player. Previously, we were unable to list them. With that being said, we are one of the only sites on the web that provides an Internet TV station listing spanning four different media players.

If you haven't already, check out our detailed list of Internet TV stations

Here is our list of updates:

November 28th & 29th, 2005
Four Season Hotel, Hong Kong

The IPTV market in the Asian region overall is predicted to grow to a value of $300 million during 2005. The number of IPTV subscribers in the Asia/Pacific region (excluding Japan) is expected to grow from nearly half a million subscribers in 2004 to over 20 million subscribers by 2009. Providers have unveiled IPTV services, or are running market trials in seven out of the thirteen Asia-Pacific economies.

Alcatel, Amdocs, and China topped the IPTV headlines this week.

Here are some other headlines we found newsworthy.

Please note that headlines we do cover will not show up in this listing.

Telefónica, one of the largest telecoms in the world, has chosen Corinex's 200Mbps AV Powerline Ethernet adapters (Adaptador PLC-Ethernet) for use in its "Imagenio" IP TV home entertainment and communications package. Corinex's equipment will be used to connect an ADSL modem, sending IP TV signals to a TV set top box via the existing electrical wiring.

International Sports and Media Group, a diversified Sports and News Marketing and Communications firm, announced today it has secured the Internet and Text Messaging rights to the upcoming International Soccer match between Paraguay vs. El Salvador on August 17, 2005 in Paraguay (sted April 17, 2005).

This match will be held in Paraguay. National team matches are very exciting, hard fought matches and draw very large crowds and sponsors, and this game will be no exception.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Asia-Pacific Market Perspective / Vol. 5, Issue 6, July Edition to their offering.

In this Issue:

Fixed Communications

China: Navigating IP Licensing Rules

In May 2005 the Shanghai Media Group became China's first company to win an IPTV license. Analyst Yiru Zhong argues that while the move is important as it will allow a major Pay TV player to expand its reach, it also highlights increased tensions between China's regulatory bodies which will have implications on the entire sector going forward.

Find yourself clicking through TV stations faster than a speeding bullet? Why not try tuning into the Internet, where viewers choices are virtually unlimited. With the phenomenal growth of broadband Internet connections, more users are finding their news, sports, and entertainment provided by the click of a mouse.

Just how has Internet television grown this year?

Sources have confirmed that the Los Gatos Company Netflix is preparing to launch an Internet on-demand rental service paired with a Netflix-provided television set-top box. The timing and nature of this launch has yet to be discussed by Netflix representatives. It was only after a pair of software glitches on the Netflix website that customers quickly discovered an accidentally displayed reference to the download service. News of this was quickly published by devoted customers in past weeks through Internet blogs.

Since launching our Internet TV station listing, we have been collecting data based on which stations are visited the most from our site. After accumulating a reasonable amount of statistics, we are happy to present the top 10 most watched stations. You can view the top 10 stations on the right hand side of our Internet TV station listing.

The results are interesting. Here are some intriguing points...

INTRACOM S.A. offers Full Service Content Distribution Network platform (fs|cdntm), a solution which enables the delivery and management of Video, Voice & Data services, thus allowing Telecom operators to offer "Triple-Play" services in a cost-efficient way, reducing customer churn and enhancing their ARPU.

Alcatel announced Hubei Telecom, a subsidiary of China Telecom, has selected the Alcatel IP service routing solution to expand and optimize its metropolitan area network for delivery of high-quality IP-based data services in Hubei Province, China. This contract was won through Alcatel Shanghai Bell, Alcatel's flagship Chinese company.