Amino Technologies Share Discussion Threads

[leading] 25/10/2006 12:11

Well I got this one wrong.

The fact that the chairman and non-execs are going en-masse suggests that the management might have been being a little economical with the truth. If the non execs don't know what's going on, then its pretty hard for the shareholders to do so.

Management appears to have no idea when the various difficulties set out in the statement concerning MPEG 4 components, software and bandwidth issues may be resolved. MPEG 2 business no longer appears profitable despite increasing volumes.

If you can't trust the management, there's only one thing to do.

I have sold and will not be back in a hurry.

[taylor20] 25/10/2006 10:32

Certainly the share buy back proposal reeks of making themselves more attractive to a takeover.

Exact same thing happened with TTC, burn off all the cash, share price dives, predator picks up the business for a steal, shareholders get shafted.

[seconduser] 25/10/2006 10:29

does anyone know how difficult this is to achieve? it's not a question.

"As with all our products, we have worked in close collaboration with key middleware providers to ensure compatibility across the board"

[dickbush] 25/10/2006 10:16

The half year statement included

"We have a strong platform for continued growth and are confident of Amino's prospects in the second half of the year and beyond".

AND

"...the increased maturity of the business means that for the future, growth in shipments and revenue should exceed the growth in the cost base to the benefit of profitability in the second half, for the full year and beyond".

This isn't going anywhere until a new board has built up credibilty again. If its really worth anything, the company will be taken over before that can happen-at a knock down price.

[robsbell] 25/10/2006 09:55

Yes j probably just above NAV.

[jotoha1] 25/10/2006 08:51

I'm sure fair value will be reached pretty soon!

[robsbell] 25/10/2006 08:15

Update, profit warning, half the board are bailing out, plan to buy shares back, well at least they will be cheap. RUBBISH.

[taylor20] 21/10/2006 15:17

Guess you fixed it :)

[c10but] 12/10/2006 06:57

Perhaps better results are expected !?

[robsbell] 11/10/2006 18:01

10% rise today, oversold maybe?

[c10but] 29/9/2006 13:01

Sorry, scrub the last post, dates are out!

[c10but] 29/9/2006 11:43

Amino scoops innovation award at IBC
Amino returned home from this year's IBC event in Amsterdam after collecting one of the industry's most prestigious awards for its latest IPTV set-top box. The AmiNET124 was awarded the Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit Award to the best IP set-top box for its innovative design and advanced performance – features which have already led to both customer interest and actual deployments only a few months following the product's initial launch at Supercomm in June 2005.

The AmiNET124 is unique for its use of a single TI DM642 Digital Signal Processor (DSP) to run both the Video decode as well as the application software, making it a highly cost-effective single-chip solution, which supports the latest H.264 video compression technology. This ability is achieved through Amino's highly innovative IPTV software platform, which enables the single DSP to run both applications.



The Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit Awards, now in their 21st year, are judged anonymously by readers of Broadcast Engineering World Edition, and a cross section of professionals from the broadcast, network and satellite industries. Generally associated with the NAB Exhibition in the USA, this is the first year that Broadcast Engineering has conveyed the Pick Hit Awards at IBC. The technology selected for the Awards is chosen by the judging panel rather than the editors and publishers of the magazine, thus ensuring the impartiality and integrity of the judging process.



"We are extremely proud to have received this award for the AmiNET124," commented Bob Giddy, CEO of Amino. "The model not only reflects the award-winning design of Amino's set-top box range but offers advanced H.264 decoding and performance, thanks to the hardware architecture and our flexible software stack which offers compatibility with a maximum range of middleware." He continued, "As with all our products, we have worked in close collaboration with key middleware providers to ensure compatibility across the board, offering peace of mind to our customers that our products will work seamlessly with their chosen IPTV infrastructure."



The AmiNET124 is the company's first H.264 compatible single-chip IPTV set-top box available for Telco IPTV deployments. Cavalier Telephone, a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) in the USA has already selected the AmiNET124 for its IPTV service roll-out and other companies have expressed a strong interest in the model which is 2 to 3 times smaller than current alternatives.

"HDTV and H.264 compression technologies were both very hot topics at IBC this year," noted Giddy. "Amino has been able to provide its customers with a powerful and attractive product which will allow Telcos to deploy H.264 IPTV services quickly and easily. The AmiNET124 was supported unanimously and present on many exhibitors' stands at IBC. This reflects the wide acceptance of the product."

[dickbush] 24/9/2006 10:27

Alcatel/Microsoft given the boot, but Amino still doesn't win the STB business.

Nortel not the only winner at Telus IPTV deal
By Faultline
Published Sunday 24th September 2006 06:02 GMT

If Nortel was unable to unearth a telco willing to give it a shot at building an IPTV service in its native Canada, then it would surely have been frozen out of the market forever.

And when a quite a few years ago Telus chose to go with OMP and Alcatel, a major chance appeared to have slipped through its fingers.


But now it is back as the main contractor in an IPTV deal at Telus - a move that sees the Alcatel system thrown out or sidelined, the Microsoft Alcatel partnership that is dominating tier one telcos, snubbed, and a number of the small fry of the IPTV market getting access to the tasty 5.5m Telus customers this system is aimed at.

What the Nortel announcement doesn't tell us is that the system will be built around Minerva middleware, Widevine DRM, use its old existing VoD servers that are built around a defunct Oracle offering, and the encoders at its head end will remain in place, while Telus is still out to tender for set tops, with Thomson apparently already in the frame and Cisco's Scientific Atlanta likely to get the second berth.

Nortel itself gets to sell a few switches, and perhaps upgrades the Telus IP network, and the access network is presumably still built around Alcatel DSLAMS and ISAMs, all with Nortel as prime contractor.

Faultline gave a heads up about this contract in May, when we heard that Microsoft's solution was internally rejected.

"Telus is working closely with Nortel to create a unique communications and entertainment experience for our customers that we call the Future Friendly Home," Telus chief technology officer Ibrahim Gedeon said.

"We are building an innovative platform that will provide us differentiated services today and as we move into the future with a converged multimedia-centric infrastructure.

"It was important to find a partner like Nortel who could provide an evolution path to a converged services environment that incorporates IPTV as one of many applications.

"To facilitate the rapid adoption of additional third party applications as they emerge, it is imperative that the environment be open and standards-based."

The significance of this contract is that all the big guns from Microsoft, Alcatel, Lucent and Siemens were in the bidding and fell by the wayside and that Nortel was able to leverage its strength as an IP player.

A 10 per cent or 20 per cent penetration of IPTV into this Telus network would mean it would become one of the biggest IPTV deployments outside the proposed system at AT&T in the US, which has yet to be scaled.

Telus remains a tier two opportunity, which perhaps didn't attract the same attention that a tier one carrier would have, but it is still indicative that the companies that have been in IPTV for the past five years can still win reasonably large contracts, when the market is not frozen by indecision.

That Minerva has won the all important middleware business must owe something to its strategy change this past six months, where it has dropped all pretence that it operates in the encoder market and gone about making friends with Harmonic, Optibase, Tandberg, and Tut systems and which was seen at IBC last week sporting Scientific Atlanta equipment in its demonstration.

Cisco's Scientific Atlanta is understood to be taking the Minerva software to heart to the point where it will build its own internal competence centre around it, and pitch it wherever Microsoft is not already the incumbent middleware offering.

If that results in any new business for Cisco then acquisition of Minerva can't be too improbable, and then it would own an end to end IPTV system, with or without Microsoft middleware.

Copyright © 2006, Faultline (

Faultline is published by Rethink Research, a London-based publishing and consulting firm. This weekly newsletter is an assessment of the impact of the week's events in the world of digital media. Faultline is where media meets technology. Subscription details here (

[dickbush] 16/9/2006 09:47

A discussion of IPTV, too long to put on here.

[cootuk] 16/9/2006 09:43

Verizon appear unhappy with Microsoft IPTV bloatware, though they still remain committed to Microsoft platforms.

"Microsoft promised that its interactive program guide would be "attractive, intuitive and easy to use," and said that its software would bring consumers "the benefits of voice, video and data convergence." It did not say that its program guide would require more memory than was available in the Motorola set-top box being designed for Verizon, though this turned out to be the case."

[darrin1471] 13/9/2006 20:07

Asset value per share 48p
"Positive cash flow increased net cash to #16.8m"
"growth in shipments and revenue should exceed the growth in the cost base to the benefit of profitability in the second half, for the full year and beyond."

[jotoha1] 13/9/2006 18:32

MM will walk this down in an orderly way to around 30 pence, being fair value !

[darrin1471] 13/9/2006 11:44

I now see Amino as fair/good value and worth keeping a closer eye on. There is going to be no western tier 1 breakthrough any time soon but Amino has done well to make any kind of profit from the meagre offerings available. Investors are going to be weary of investing in a falling share price, so a bump along the bottom followed by a rise up to the final results should prove a positive investment. A recovery equal to half of the loses in shareholder value suffered over the last 6 months, equals a 50% improvement from where we are now.

[dickbush] 13/9/2006 10:10

Nortel to help Telus migrate to IPTV network
By Brian Santo, CED
September 12, 2006
Telus has engaged Nortel to assure it continuously has the appropriate equipment and infrastructure for the latest IP services as they emerge.

Telus has developed a marketing thrust it is calling the Future Friendly Home, aimed at continuously introducing new IP-based services. Nortel will be responsible for integrating an open, standards-based IPTV network.

Nortel anchors a group of technology companies who together can provide the elements of an end-to-end IPTV solution. They include: IPTV middleware from Minerva Networks and Orca Interactive; video-on-demand (VOD) from Kasenna and BitBand; content security solutions from Irdeto; encoders from Harmonic and Optibase; a Web browser interface from Espial; digital program insertion (DPI) from Terayon; an emergency alert system (EAS) from Trilithic; xDSL modems from Westell; and set-top boxes from Amino.

It may or may not be a coincidence that Nortel is also the lead company integrating the new IP-based network being built by Sprint Nextel. And Sprint Nextel just happens to be the company the cable industry is working with to add wireless telephony to the bundle.

[dickbush] 12/9/2006 15:53

OpenTV Teams With Innovative Systems to Deliver Turnkey IPTV

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- OpenTV Corp. OPTV, a leading provider of enabling technologies for advanced digital television services, and Innovative Systems, a leading supplier of advanced telephony technology and services, today announced a strategic partnership to provide integrated, turn-key IPTV solutions for telcos. This solution will enable telcos to include advanced digital video, interactive television, and advanced telephony services as part of their offering.

Innovative Systems, leveraging its national sales and support team, will market the solution, which will consist of IPTV set-tops running OpenTV Core2(TM) middleware together with personal video recording software and a suite of interactive television and telephony applications. The solution will include an electronic program guide (EPG) with video on demand capability as well as on-screen caller ID, voicemail, and other IPTV -- Internet -- Telephony blended services.

"This relationship accelerates our continued progress in the evolving IPTV world, enabling us to leverage our core competencies in advanced digital television with Innovative Systems' significant experience and customer relationships in the independent telco market," said James A. (Jim) Chiddix, CEO of OpenTV. "By offering a complete, turn-key IPTV solution, we hope to accelerate the time to market that telcos can expect. And by partnering with Innovative, which has a long and successful track record in the independent telco market with more than 500 customers, we think we can make faster progress developing and delivering a reliable, scalable solution that will form the basis for the continued extension of our product lineup."

The integrated IPTV solution will initially be built for the Amino family of set-top boxes and will include support for MPEG 2/4, personal video recording, standard definition and high definition video. Additionally, the solution will include VOD capability and a suite of interactive television and telephony applications, including news, weather, sports, and on-screen control of telephony services, including caller ID and voicemail management. Innovative Systems will offer an integrated headend server, based on its recently announced IMS Application Server for set-top-box and subscriber management. The IMS/IPTV server will include OpenTV's Streamer(TM) and Notify(TM) capabilities, enabling IPTV management, interactive TV application distribution, and dynamic messaging capability in a redundant carrier grade hardware platform.

"We see a real need in the independent telco market for a more full- featured IPTV solution than is currently available. We are very excited to be partnering with OpenTV, one of the world's top middleware providers," said Roger Musick, CEO of Innovative Systems. "We have a long history of developing advanced features, and OpenTV's technology platform will allow Innovative Systems to develop next generation blended services that enable our customers to offer differentiated services, dramatically improving their ability to compete in their markets."

About Open TV

OpenTV is one of the world's leading providers of technologies and services enabling the delivery of digital and interactive television. The company's software has been integrated in over 70 million digital set-top- boxes in 96 countries. The software enables enhanced program guides, video-on- demand, personal video recording, enhanced television, interactive shopping, interactive and addressable advertising, games and gaming and a variety of consumer care and communication applications. For more information, please visit www.opentv.com .

About Innovative Systems

Respected customer support, carrier grade products and an industry leading vision are the foundation of Innovative Systems. Innovative Systems is a dominant provider of enhanced service platforms and Operational Support Systems (OSS). The Innovative Systems Application Peripheral (AP) is the most feature rich and widely deployed platform in the industry with over 700 systems in service working with all central office types. The recently developed eLation OSS solutions have already proven to be a great market success with sixty plus customers in the first 30 months. For more information, please contact your Innovative Systems sales representative, Innovative Systems office or visit www.innovsys.com .

[cfb2] 12/9/2006 13:35

No, just comments in the morning headlines following the analyst's visit to IBC conference.

CFB

[minho] 12/9/2006 13:26

cfb2 thanks for that, did they quote any data?

[cfb2] 12/9/2006 13:23

Today's drop is probably caused by Altium Capital reiterating their sell recommendation.

CFB