In yet another online video acquisition, GoFish Corporation announced it has agreed to acquire Bolt, Inc. in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at $30 million. The combined company will develop made-for-Internet programming that is ideally suited for advertisers targeting the 18-34 year-old demographic.

The acquisition will enable GoFish to distribute its original short form programs through Bolt's online properties, including Bolt.com, a popular youth-oriented website. Bolt, which reported sales in 2006 of approximately $7 million (unaudited), counts Coca-Cola, Verizon Wireless, Nike, Sony and various other Fortune 500 companies among its repeat advertisers.

At the 3GSM World Congress, Adobe announced that support for video will be integrated in the next generation of Adobe Flash Lite software, Adobe's Flash Player designed specifically for mobile phones. Flash Lite 3 is expected to be available in the first half of 2007 and will bring the Adobe Flash Player video format from the desktop to mobile phones and devices.

Flash Lite will support the same video formats supported by Adobe Flash Player and will directly support video streams delivered by the Adobe Flash Media Server, allowing users to view a broad spectrum of Flash Player compatible content.

Flash Lite runs on multiple platforms, including Symbian S60 v2/v3, Qualcomm BREW 2.x/3.x and Microsoft Windows Mobile 5, in addition to embedded operating systems on a variety of OEM platforms.

Ericsson announced its acquisition of Entrisphere, a company providing fiber access technology, based in Santa Clara, USA. The acquisition will help strengthen Ericsson's fixed broadband access portfolio and its position in converged networks.

Silicon & Software Systems (S3) and Irdeto revealed a new solution that allows operators to deliver Mobile TV, via a DVB-H network, to both desktop and laptop PCs using commonly available components.

The new solution uses a standard DVB-T receiver and USB card-reader to receive DVB-H broadcast services. Both components are commercially available and the total solution costs less then €100.

Pulvermedia today announced the speaker lineup for the Video on the Net conference, taking place March 19-22, at the San Jose, CA McEnery Convention Center.

At this year's event, Jeff Pulver will share his thoughts and predictions across the Media, Internet, Communications and Entertainment (MICE) market segments. For more than a decade, the VON conferences have explored the issues, trends and challenges associated with the Internet and Communications (the IC in MICE). This year's event continues to address these topics, while also discussing how Media and Entertainment add exciting new disruptive forces to the marketplace. Jeff will discuss these topics, and many more, during his opening address, which is scheduled for 8:45 AM on Tuesday, March 20.

While Disney came out and stated their bright outlook for streaming high-quality video on the web, Google, of all companies, warned at Cable Europe Congress that the Internet was not designed for web TV and that such services may cripple the Internet.

"The Web infrastructure and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," said Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology.

Can this be true? Google and the cable companies actually agree on one thing? Or perhaps this is a big ploy to get more content on Google Checkout?

However, in an article by Reuters on the subject, Google said they would work with cable companies to "combine their video search and advertising technology" with the cable networks delivery of shows. Sorry? How does this better our situation for television delivery?

Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks, spoke at Disney's investor conference today and said their ABC Internet TV player has already sold out its advertising inventory for the first and second quarter of 2007. According to Disney, about 50 million requests have been made since September for episodes on their player.

The ABC Internet TV player currently shows episodes of Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Lost, Ugly Betty, and other prime-time shows the day after they air. Disney has said they will expand on that and begin including national and local news later this year.

Disney also said they will enhance the broadband player to allow for picture size and bandwidth adjustment.

We missed an article in ZDNet published a few days ago about a not-so-new project out of Adobe Labs, called "Philo". Philo is an little Internet TV platform that Adobe has been working on and could prove a competitor for Joost or even Brightcove.

Kevin Lynch demonstrated the Philo project during his keynote at the Adobe MAX 2006 conference. If you fast forward about 36 minutes into the webcast, you can see a walk-through of Philo.

MediaGuardian.co.uk has compiled a side-by-side comparison of similar triple-play packages offered by providers in the UK market. The article examines the pricing and features included for bundles of television (IPTV where available), broadband, and telephone service. Companies included in the comparison include Virgin Media, Sky, BT, Orange, Carphone Warehouse, Tiscali, and Vodafone.

Heavy Reading has released a report on the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) market. The report covers a review of current core DWDM deployments, transport requirements for future services, feature requirements for next-gen core DWDM, and timing of deployments.

In large part due to the growing demand and usage of online video, the majority of network operators are either upgrading or will upgrade their core DWDM networks in 2007.

According to a new ABI Research Brief, network operators are slowly beginning to roll out all-IP next generation networks (NGN). The move to an Internet Protocol-based infrastructure is a natural evolution for the fixed network as broadband services, including Voice over IP, take over from the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Mobile networks have a parallel evolution to IP (although at a slower pace), but the standards work is accelerating. By the end of 2007 there will be full NGN standards for fixed and mobile networks allowing IP-based services to be deployed on NGN, a process that ABI Research analysts expect to be largely complete by 2015 for a total cumulative investment of more than $1 trillion.

17 - 20 April 2007
Okura Hotel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Total Telecom World Telecommunications Congress is a leadership forum where the CEOs of the world’s largest networks and content providers come together. The event is a window into the telecoms business of tomorrow.

Cisco and SES AMERICOM are working together to enable rural local exchange carriers in North America to offer IPTV to their subscribers using a solution that combines the Cisco IP Next-Generation Networks with SES AMERICOM's IP-PRIME IPTV service. The end-to-end offering processes content and television programming and distributes it via satellite to telecommunications companies and their IPTV consumers nationwide. Systems integration from both companies and their respective partners is an integral part of the offering.

In rural areas of the United States, telecommunications companies will offer IP-PRIME through the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) in partnership with the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA).

Shenick Network Systems has launched diversifEye10G, the single module 10 Gigabit per second stateful IP application traffic tester. For the first time, equipment manufacturers and network operators can test and perfect their IP services at an application, network and user quality of experience level in 10 Gbps environments before new and upgraded services are offered to end users.

HP launched a new business called HP Video Merchant Services. The business powers online video web stores and provides content fulfillment services for retailers.

Wal-Mart, the first customer of the service, unveiled a beta version of its video download store powered by HP. The new Wal-Mart site allows customers to easily discover, shop for and purchase the movie and television titles they want with the option of downloading the digital versions to a PC or portable video player in addition to purchasing the DVD for mail delivery.

However, it may not be that easy for Firefox users as you can see how the new Wal-Mart site looks below. TechCrunch reported the new service has a significant rendering issue in Firefox. It appears either HP or Wal-Mart dropped the ball in cross-browser usability.