The Nielsen Company's new TV/Internet Convergence Panel, which electronically measures both television and Internet usage in the same homes, has found that television viewing and online video streaming are complementary activities.

According to the convergence panel, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all.

TiVo and Netflix are teaming up to provide Netflix and TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL subscribers with the ability to have thousands of movies and TV episodes instantly streamed from Netflix directly to their TVs.

The two companies said they are initiating a test of the new capability today in several thousand U.S. households and expect it to be broadly available in early December, in time for the holidays. The ability to instantly watch content from Netflix on the TV via TiVo DVRs will be offered at no additional charge to customers who subscribe to both services.

When it comes to viewing TV and video, growth in consumer markets is more limited by consumers’ ability to absorb new usage models and new applications than by limitations of technology, according to a new US consumer survey from ABI Research.

The online survey, which examined avenues of video delivery and consumption, found age influencing several patterns of consumption.

CBS.com leads all other TV Network Web sites in unique monthly viewers (6.1 MM), video streams (44.4 MM) and minutes streamed (143 MM), according to comScore Video Metrix (Sept. 2008). This marks the second consecutive month that CBS.com has led the other broadcast networks in metrics across the board. CBS.com also experienced double digit growth in unique viewers month over month (16%) and year over year (60%), and triple digit growth in streams over last year (107%).

Sky Angel adds several significant upgrades to their nationally-available IPTV subscription service. These enhancements include upgraded security features, greater wireless router support, ongoing additions to the VOD library and other features that provide subscribers with more ability to determine what programs they watch on their schedule.

Existing Sky Angel customers automatically receive this software upgrade to their Sky Angel IPTV set-top box. The upgrade is integrated upon activation and installation for new subscribers.

Entone's Hydra IP video gateway has been chosen by Interstate Telecommunications for their IPTV rollout. ITC provides local telephone, digital television and broadband services to subscribers in South Dakota and Minnesota. ITC has been providing telecommunications services to its communities for over 50 years, and now offers a triple play service bundle of voice, video, and data using Entone’s Hydra IP video gateway.

Broadcasting to mobile devices is one of the most relevant technological solutions to make information accessible. Various aspects of development of this technology will be considered on October 31 at the Second international forum "Mobile broadcasting. World experience and prospects of realization in the countries of Eastern Europe". The Forum is held within the context of the Integrated program of preparation to the coverage "2012: Ukraine Presents".

During the Olympic Games 2008, Octoshape solutions were streaming Olympic coverage in HD (2.5 mbps) for several broadcasters in Asia, some in corporation with CDNetworks.

Using the powerful features of the Octoshape streaming protocol, multiple point failover, throughput optimization, and loss resilience made it possible to deliver HD quality to end users all over Asia.

Latens secures du IPTV service has grown to over 50,000 subscribers. du, the UAE based integrated telecommunications service provider, offers an innovative, multilingual IPTV service, providing TV channels from the UAE and around the world, catering to the tastes of different nationalities and cultures.

Parks Associates is hosting the workshop Business Cases for Emerging Video Services at TelcoTV 2008 on November 11. TelcoTV, November 11-13, the Anaheim Convention Center, is the premier event for the exploration of a comprehensive entertainment convergence strategy.

The workshop addresses the business case for emerging video services, including multichannel television and broadband video. Parks Associates forecasts that by 2012, almost 33 million U.S. households will have broadband services capable of streaming high-definition video. This finding adds new dimensions to the television services market, which grew to over 800 million households worldwide in 2007. Telco/IPTV services in particular jumped to more than 13 million households in 2007.

Codenomicon launches its DEFENSICS for IPTV solution. Based on the unique Codenomicon DEFENSICS Robustness and Security test platform and designed to work with all existing IMS & non-IMS IPTV platforms that are part of the Global MSF Interoperability 2008 event.

With double the installed base of any security vendor, Codenomicon DEFENSICS is the market leader providing cutting edge testing solutions for the Telecom and Data networking industry. Born from research conducted by the Secure Programming Group at the University of Oulu, the DEFENSICS for IPTV solution uncovers various deployment issues including Distributed Denial of Service, Zero day, Content source & Channel zapping attacks - all prior to deployment, thereby enabling service providers to ensure the successful market launch of their IPTV services.

Visit us at IPTV World Forum - IPTV World Forum Middle East, Booth #26

WHO: Verimatrix enhances the value and security of pay-TV networks with advanced technologies designed to address the content protection challenges of today, and those of tomorrow. The Verimatrix 3-Dimensional Content Security approach provides a framework to enhance operator competitiveness and the consumer experience in the new world of pay-TV.

Clipta has secured $500,000 in financing through Angel investment. In addition, Clipta also revealed it has successfully implemented the advanced self-learning deep Web crawler technology that will propel the company toward its goal of indexing one billion online videos worldwide by 2010.

Clipta.com has operated as one of the fastest growing worldwide video search provider since its first release in May of 2008. Over six months, Clipta's servers indexed approximately 35 million videos. Based on dramatic growth in online video and with the onset of Clipta's new deep crawling technology, Clipta expects to meaningfully index all searchable and available online videos.

comScore released data from the comScore Video Metrix service, indicating that 25.9 million German Internet users viewed more than 3 billion videos online in August 2008. comScore Video Metrix, which was the first video tracking service introduced in the U.S. more than two years ago, has become a leading service for online video measurement and is the only service of its kind in Germany.

Akamai and Microsoft plan to enable HD quality experiences on PCs. Akamai will release a beta version of a new service, powered by Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Silverlight, to deliver rich Internet applications via the world’s largest HTTP edge network.

Microsoft is introducing new Web server technology, called Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7.0) Smooth Streaming, that gives consumers instant start-up times and no buffering by adapting the quality of the video stream in real time based upon changing connectivity speed. This enables companies to boost brand awareness and advertising revenues by extending average viewing times. They can also benefit from unprecedented network scalability using distributed HTTP-based Web servers.