wunderLOOP, a company focused on integrated behavioral advertising and content targeting, has secured funding from top-tier global investors including:

• Klaus Hommels - "European Angel Investor of 2006" (awarded by the universities of Fontainebleau, IESE and St. Gallen)
• Atomico Investments - the investment group whose principal visionary and co-founder is Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype and Joost
• Howard Hartenbaum - acclaimed as top venture capitalist of 2006 in the Forbes Midas List, also General Partner of Draper Richards who was responsible for the founding investment in Skype
• European Founders Fund - the investment fund established by the Samwer brothers, previously founders of Jamba and Alando.de (acquired by eBay Germany)

The folks at GameVideos provide a good look at IPTV via the Xbox 360 and have a question and answer period with two Microsoft execs, Chris Satchell and Albert Penello.

Satchell and Penello discuss Microsoft's strategy for the Xbox 360 as an IPTV set-top box and their plans on utilizing it as a personal video recorder (PVR). Microsoft currently only provides a 20 Gb hard drive, which would only allow for a limited number of recorded movies or television shows. Clearly Microsoft will need to provide a hard drive with larger capacity to provide decent PVR capabilities. With that being said, Penello speculates about a different version of the Xbox or hard drive for a consumer with IPTV contrary to a retail consumer.

While Microsoft has only announced a single partnership with AT&T for use of the Xbox 360 with their IPTV U-verse service, Satchell says the company is talking to a lot of providers now.



Part two of the interview is here.

According to an article in Light Reading, France Telecom is urging IPTV operators to visit their technology labs, adopt a similar ecosystem as theirs, and ramp up IPTV rollouts to help smaller vendors focused on specialized services invest more in research and developmet. Read the full story.

At AT&T's fourth quarter earnings call today, chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre provided good news for all those eagerly anticipating U-verse service. He stated that AT&T plans to ramp up deployment of their U-verse service and intends to pass 8 million living units by year-end 2007. Currently, AT&T U-verse services are only available in 11 markets.

However, there was mixed news for those in the Bellsouth area. When asked about their video strategy for Bellsouth, AT&T stated the strategy was not yet concrete but they would look to develop that out in the months to come. On a positive note, Whitacre stated that Bellsouth contains a significant amount of fiber plant and they anticipate a quicker rollout compared to the SBC footprint.

Once again confirming AT&T's commitment to their network implementation, Whitacre stated, "We're committed to IPTV in a fiber-to-the-node network. It's the right architecture for the long-term. We see it in the field. It works and it delivers to our customers."

According to AT&T, the U-verse service has been well received by customers. "Our customer feedback thus far has been very good and in fact, we think it out-performs cable in side-by-side comparisons." AT&T also noted that 70% of their customers are subscribing to higher-end video packages and AT&T's fastest broadband speeds.

AT&T's U-verse service was a hot topic during the question period and when asked whether AT&T has a plan B for their video services, Whitacre reasserted, "Our fiber-to-the-node architecture is performing better than we anticipated it would. We're actually seeing better bandwidth then we had forecast. And we're seeing that better bandwidth in both the short and long loop links."

He went on, "It works and it works well. The network is good. All of the delays and some of the difficulties we've had are due to programming and we think we're just about to get all of them solved. Everything seems to be working well so this is our plan A and plan A we're sticking with. We like this stuff."

Officials with Eagle Broadband, Inc. announced that the company has been awarded a new patent on its advanced set-top box technology that ensures secure delivery of digital television content.

The company's recently patented technology (U.S. Patent 7,159,044) virtually eliminates the risk of unauthorized network access and theft of digital content in hotels, condominium buildings and local cable companies that provide IPTV cable television services. Television programming and access to a main network can be "unlocked" by an in-room set-top box only if both the proper software and hardware (set-top box) are operating normally.

RawFlow, a provider of live P2P streaming technologies, has partnered with ChinaCache, the largest content delivery network (CDN) in China. RawFlow and ChinaCache will jointly promote Peer-To-Peer technology in the China market. ChinaCache will deploy the technology for its media delivery network and serve customers with P2P live broadcasting. China has the world's second largest internet population, with more than 132 million connections and 42 million broadband subscribers; making internet broadcast an incredibly attractive medium.

UTStarcom, Inc. announced a contract with China Telecom (CTC) to deploy its RollingStream end-to-end IPTV solution for a new commercial IPTV network in China's Shanxi Province.

The initial deployment, supporting 30,000 subscribers, is planned to include 14 service points covering major metropolitan areas of Xian, the capital city of Shanxi Province. The service is expected to offer up to 80 channels of live, broadcast television; 24-hour time-shifting capability; approximately 10,000 hours of video-on-demand (VOD) content; and valued-added services including karaoke and gaming.

UK's communications regulatory body, Ofcom, has told BBC to rethink their ambitions of offering on-demand Internet TV. Ofcom stated several aspects of the new service would hurt rival services and would "not be in the long-term public interest."

Other requests made by Ofcom included dropping plans to offer audio books and classic music for free and reducing the length of time consumers could store video.

For more details, check out this article from silicon.com.

Light Reading reports from TVoDSL 2007 that Nortel's IPTV strategy includes acquisition intentions. According to their source, a few acquisitions would help prove Nortel's commitment to the IPTV market. Read the full article.

Juniper Networks, Inc. and Intelliden, Inc. announced that they will deliver a Dynamic Network Automation solution for high bandwidth IP services. By integrating Juniper Networks Service Deployment System (SDX-300) platform and Intelliden's Dynamic Resource Provisioning solution, the joint DNA solution will link end-to-end policy and real-time network resource management by extending intelligence to the network core. The DNA solution will help communications service providers deliver broadband services with enhanced quality of experience (QoE), greater service reliability and higher scalability while containing operational costs.

In only a few months time, On Telecoms has completed the initial phase of a fully owned metropolitan fibre network in Attica of more than 170km. Thanks to this network, On Telcoms will start offering triple play services for 40% of households and businesses and will reach 80% by March 2007.

On Telecoms' "All-in-One" triple play package will offer the services:

• telephony: one telephone line which comes with unlimited local, national and most popular international call duration (15 countries, inc. USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy etc.)
• fast broadband: up to 10 Mbps with wireless connection (10 times faster compared to most common ADSL connection today used in the market)
• video: a real innovative service which enhances the way customers use their TV, including access to channels in digital quality. On Telecoms provides a new TV experience, deciding when and what to watch. The on demand service allows customers to choose among a selection of over 1000 titles ranging from recent to classical movies. The package also includes the VideoBox, On Telecoms' High Definition and Dolby Digital-ready set-top box. Through our technology customers will soon be able to subscribe to NOVA IPTV without the need of a dish or additional installation.

France's leading cable operator, NOOS, has launched series of themed interactive video mosaics based on the new httv Prime//Mosaic solution.

NOOS' interactive video mosaic presents all the channels related to a dedicated theme, such as sports, music, kids, etc., on one page. The viewer can then navigate with the remote control from one thumbnail to another, with synchronized audio or to an interactive service available on the themed portal (real time info, scores, games, etc). httv's new solution is a fully integrated system featuring video, audio, and interactivity, which increases flexibility and dramatically reduces the cost of creating mosaic channels.

Jazztel has launched its video-on-demand (VOD) service, Videoclub, across Spain using Kasenna's PortalTV product suite. The project, which encompasses more that 50 of Kasenna's video servers, has been hailed as one of the broadest rollouts of IPTV-based VOD services in the world today.

The Videoclub service gives Jazztel customers access to a range of video content -- including movies, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Jazztel's nationwide Videoclub service is built on the foundation provided by Kasenna's MediaBase Video Server platform, employed by Jazztel to deliver H.264 video streaming right across Spain, and by vFusion, Kasenna's content distribution software that allows Jazztel to optimize storage between a centralized server and streaming edge servers.

Amdocs launched Amdocs 7, the first industry-specific software suite that allows service providers to offer their customers the benefits of access to any service, over any network, at any time and on any device, which is made possible by the move to next-generation networks and the convergence of voice, video, data, content, and entertainment. Results of a survey commissioned by Amdocs, indicate that providers expect big revenue jumps from such convergent services and plan to boost spending to deliver a superior customer experience.

Dreampark and Accedo Broadband announced a new partnership today to further strengthen the appeal and opportunities with the Dreamgallery IPTV middleware. The new partnership will provide operators with a wide range of revenue-generating and differentiating interactive services that are already customized and pre-integrated into the Dreampark middleware solution.

The Accedo Application Portfolio includes value added services such as Karaoke on Demand, casual games, quizzes, puzzles, VideoArt, horoscope and comics, as well as mail and chat services made exclusively for IPTV.