Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange

The board of directors of Orange has issued a statement in which it publicly asserts “full confidence” in CEO and chairman Stéphane Richard, who has been arrested in connection with a corruption investigation in France dating back to 2008.

Richard previously worked in the French Finance Ministry and he faces questions relating to his role in a 2008 payment made to businessman Bernard Tapie.

He was arrested last week and his detention was extended by 24 hours on Tuesday by the Court of Justice of the Republic, which investigates ministerial misconduct in France.

In a statement released on June 17th, following a meeting with Richard in which he explained his position, the Orange board said: “The Board has decided to reassert its full confidence in Stéphane Richard and his ability to effectively meet the numerous challenges facing Orange with the same energy as ever in the best interests of the company, its employees, its customers and its shareholders.

“In particular the Board considers that the legal measures affecting Stéphane Richard do not impede his ability to fully and effectively lead Orange as its chairman and [CEO]“.

Votes of confidence are easily rescinded, however. In October last year TeliaSonera CEO Lars Nyberg was given public backing by his board only to be ousted in February this year. Today it was announced that his replacement will be Johan Dennelind, until now the CEO of South African operator Vodacom.

Amsterdam-based TP Vision, a joint venture between Phillips and Taiwanese firm TPV Technology, is planning to use the smartclip platform to deliver standardised, server-based digital advertising on Philips Smart TVs in Western Europe and Russia.

smartclip was founded in 2009 and has since created a network of 700 publishers, servicing more than one billion video streams every month.

Describing the deal as significantly expanding smartclip’s ad inventory, CEO Jean-Pierre Fumagalli said that it will “give advertisers the possibility to reach their target groups on Connected TV with considerable reach”.

Johan Dennelind, incoming CEO at TeliaSonera

European mobile operator group TeliaSonera has announced the appointment of CEO of South African operator Vodacom International Johan Dennelind as its next president and CEO.

Dennelind fills the position vacated by Lars Nyberg, who stepped down from his role in February this year amid a corruption scandal surrounding the firm’s operations in Uzbekistan.

Acting CEO Per-Arne Blomquist will remain in that role until September 1 before returning to his previous role as executive vice president and CFO. This will be Dennelind’s official start date, although he will be “available for the company” from July 1, 2013, TeliaSonera said.

Dennelind has almost 20 years’ of experience in the telecommunication industry. During his time at Vodacom, and before that at Norwegian operator group Telenor, he has “proven that he can successfully lead organisations in significant change processes within an international environment,” according to TeliaSonera chairman Marie Ehrling.

“With Per-Arne Blomquist now returning to his role… we are securing continuity in the business whilst through Johan Dennelind also providing a fresh start,” she added.

The end of Nyberg’s tenure was marred by corruption allegations involving operations in Uzbekistan. Law firm Mannheimer Swartling was assigned to make an assessment of the allegations and published a review that did not find that TeliaSonera had been involved in bribery or money laundering. The law firm did, however, criticise TeliaSonera for failing to conduct a sufficiently in depth analysis into the identity of the local partner in Uzbekistan before investing.

Head of group communications Cecilia Edström has also announced that she will leave her position during the summer of 2013. She has held the role since May 2008.

Piggybacking on the European Commission’s latest release of its Digital Agenda Scoreboard, which revealed a couple of days ago that just over half of Europeans currently have access to speeds above 30 Mbps, Point Topic estimates that only 12% of rural households are currently covered by Next-Generation Access technologies such as DOCSIS 3.0 cable, VDSL and fibre-to-the-premises.

However, while the EC currently predicts that wiring up the whole continent to superfast broadband will cost in the region of €180-240bn, Point Topic believes it could be done for as (relatively) little as €82bn – with two-thirds of that figure being needed for rural areas.

Of Europe’s big four economies, France – as the most rural – has the biggest investment need at €17.5bn. The UK on the other hand, although similar in population, needs only €7.5bn, according to the research firm.

The €52 billion estimate also assumes that superfast investment will be capped at an average of €2,000 per household. “Most of that amount will have to be funded by the taxpayer in one way or another,” says Point Topic’s Tim Johnson “and we think that’s about as much as they will stand for. But we think that a large proportion of rural Europe will get wired up on that basis.”

The new IPTV service will deliver a mix of live TV, premier sports channels, video-on-demand and a rich set of “infotainment” services to end-users. Amino is to supply MPEG-2/MPEG-4 IPTV set-top boxes, while Intracom will provide its Full-Service Content Distribution Network (fs|cdn) platform.

Amino CEO Donald McGarva said: “This new contract underlines the importance of our combined approach with ecosystem partners to support major operators with their deployment plans. We’re very pleased to continue building our strong relationship with both Intracom Telecom and the operator in the delivery of great entertainment experiences.”

IPTV demand continues to soar

There will be just shy of 1bn pay-TV households worldwide by 2018, with IPTV accounting for around 167mn of them, according to UK firm Digital TV Research.

Of little surprise to industry watchers, China is expected to have the most pay-TV subscribers in five years’ time with 313mn, followed by India with 158mn, then the US with 107mn.

Pay-TV penetration at end-2018 will range from 99% in the Netherlands to 29% in the Middle East and Africa.

IPTV operators are expected to add 98mn paying subscribers over the next five years, while digital cablecos will add 240mn customers (both paying and non-paying) to reach 513mn, and pay DTH operators will add 73mn households to reach 251mn customers.

After analysing the world’s 20 largest IPTV providers (serving 83% of global IPTV households, or 57mn), the study found that China alone accounts for just over a third of the global total, thanks largely to the efforts of China Telecom and China Unicom.

China Telecom has nearly 5x the global market share of its peers

As the world’s second-largest market in terms of subscribers after China, France is home to four IPTV operators ranked among the global top 20. Of the fourteen operators not in France or China, five are located in Western Europe and five are in Asia.

Microsof Mediaroom remains the world’s most-deployed IPTV middleware, serving 16% of the world’s IPTV subscribers by the end of last year. Among the world’s top 20 IPTV providers, a total of seven decided to develop their own middleware in-house, according to SNL Kagan.

Local loyalties also appear to run high here: three-quarters of the world’s largest IPTV operators are reported to have partnered with middleware vendors from their home regions.

The newly-combined company has 25mn customers (based mostly in Europe) for its voice, video and data services, of which nearly 5mn are served by Virgin Media.

Liberty Global recently named Tom Mockridge as new chief executive officer of Virgin Media and Dana Strong as its chief operating officer, taking over respectively from Neil Berkett and Andrew Barron.

Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global, said: “With superior network capacity, the fastest broadband speeds and innovative digital TV platforms, we’ve never been more excited about the growth potential and strategic direction of our business.”

As a key part of the acquisition, revealed back in February, Liberty Global has opted to become a subsidiary of a new UK-based holding company, also called Liberty Global, which will operate as a UK public limited company.

Despite the plethora of channels, only 21 of them are part of the public broadcasting system, according to the Observatory. However, those which do exist (such as CBBC in the UK, KIKA in Germany and Gulli in France) are often the most popular in their respective markets.

The most important of the pan-European brands are Disney (63 channels), Nickelodeon (44), Cartoon Network (29) and Boomerang (21), which have a large number of linguistic variations throughout Europe.

In terms of popularity, the Disney Channel scores highest in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia, while it is in second place in Denmark, Spain, the UK, Portugal and Sweden.

The most important pan-European channels such as Disney, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network all have many on-demand services targeting different European countries, with the majority of them registered in the UK.

Ericsson’s Mobility Report revealed that video makes up the largest segment of data traffic in networks, with total consumption of mobile video expected to grow around 60% annually through 2018.

Average consumption of mobile video per subscriber can be as high as 2.6 GB per month in some networks, according to Ericsson, although mobile users don’t necessarily tend to spend the most time on data-heavy applications like video.

Doug Gilstrap, senior VP and head of strategy at Ericsson, said: “We expect LTE subscriptions to exceed 1 billion in 2017, driven by more capable devices and demand for data-intensive services such as video.”

Worldwide smartphone subscriptions are thought by Ericsson to have hit 1.2bn last year – a number due to reach 4.5bn by the end of 2018, when 60% of the world’s population should have LTE coverage.