Industry News Summary – Global Crossing, Skype, HTML 5 and more

How Skype plans to expand its business
Gigaom wrote an article about how Skype plans to grow its business beside offering premium features, such as group chat;
Skype success with its recent IPO is highly debated as currently the majority of Skype revenue is generated by the Skype-Out feature (86% of Skype net revenue). While the “freemium” model is rather popular and so-far proven in the case of Skype, one must wonder what will happen if major competitors will enter its field. A wide verity of business services might be just the thing Skype needs to remain a fierce competitor in the VoIP world.

France Telecom (under the Orange brand) beings offering Quad-Play deals
Under the name “Open Orange”, France Telecom will offer packages that will start at 39.9 euro per month. The offers will include mobile calls, unlimited SMS, broadband, IPTV and free calls to fixed lines in France. Triple and Quad packages are already popular at around the world, being offered by several us cable companies and in UK by Virgin Media. At IMTC 2025 we’ve talked about Triple-Play from a developer and a provider perspective:

Cable Operators to bring subscription TV to tablet devices
According to IntoMobile.com, at least seven of the ten major cable operators in the US are looking at tablets as a new platform for consuming subscription TV.  The connection between tablets and smart-phones to TV viewing seems inevitable and even too obvious  - will we see tablet offerings from the Cable operators themselves?

Lighsquared LTE swapping spectrum with Inmarsat
The new 4G whole-sale operator we mentioned in our previous post will swap channels with Inmarsat as their current satellite spectrum license isn’t LTE optimized.

Are HTML 5 and H264 a really open alternative for the Web?
Christopher Blizzard, a known open source evangelist wrote an article about H264 and his definition of “open”. Christopher warns us from the likes of GIF, a once prominent graphic format that was widely used over the web – and became less and less compelling after Unisys started to enforce their GIF-related patents.

Global Crossings – Buying or selling?
Lightreading.com wrote an article about Global Crossings latest financial projections for 2010 and future company strategy -
“CEO John Legere and Global Crossing CMO David Carey, say in an interview this week that they believe their company is operating from a position of strength, but expecting to find ways to grow both organically and by acquisition or merger.”

Either by buying or selling consolidation is an expected process in the industry – it only remains to be seen if a competitor to AT&T and Verizon will arise and if Global Crossing will play a major role in forming it.

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