Now, I’ve created companies with all kinds of structures in all kinds of companies in my time, and the first question arising for Project V is what its corporate structure should be.

The objectives are to keep the company small, profitable and very virtual, so it could live anywhere in the world.

The US has become a very business-unfriendly environment with high fundraising costs and serious regulation issues, especially for small companies. You also have the ridiculous variations in corporate regulation from state to state. So, Delaware and Nevada are out.

Almost all of Europe retains archaic attitudes to forming a business. It can take many months in most EU countries, so they’re out. The exceptions are Ireland and the UK.

Ireland is attractive for low sales tax and low corporation tax. The UK has relatively high rates of corporation tax and very high sales tax. There is an in-between option – the Isle of Man, which has no corporation tax and very low personal tax. Unfortunately, to really benefit from these you need to live on an island in the Irish Sea.

I’ve decided to keep things simple and to continue contributing to the phenomenal amount of tax I have paid in the past to the IR in the UK.

For a small company, the red tape is getting worse and the tax regime is nowhere are near as attractive as it once was for small corporations, but it is probably the easiest option to manage and oversee since I have built up a network of great advisers over the years.

Project V will therefore be a UK based company.

Go here to see the original:
Project V – Corporate Musings

A curious deal lands in my inbox today – the acquisition of AssetHouse by set top box company Amino.

Now, some years ago, just after Narrowtsep was founded, and the company had clear blue water between itself and any other video content management company, AssetHouse were trying to adapt their content management system to work for BT in serving digital assets. The words ’square peg’ and ’round hole’ came to mind at the time and I remember executives from both companies spending endless meeting trying to pry out what Narrowtsep did and how they did it.

Fast forward some years and I had no idea that AssetHouse was still in existence. Amino have always been light on the software side of their proposition and as the STB market becomes, well, the web browser device market, the need for a backend system becomes more apparent.

Now, since I haven’t seen what they’ve been up to for the past five years I can’t comment on whether AssetHouse is a good buy or not, but in all that time I did not come across their name once in any digital media pitch.

Credit:
Moving Assets

Finally! The BBC is to offer a simulcast service. I haven’t seen any details of how they are going to achieve this and if it’s integrated with iPlayer. But, on top of the grumbling from the likes of Virgin, Sky and Joost about Kangaroo (SeeSaw) and Tiscali and many ISPs about the iPlayer, I suspect that in meeting viewers’ demands, the BBC is prodding a very large wasps’ nest.

Excerpt from:
About Time Too

Consolidation continues in the internet TV market as Jump TV arranges to acquire IPTV platform company NeuLion. After Jump TV’s acquisition of Cycling TV, I had an inkling that Jump TV and Narrowstep, who provide Cycling’s platform, would merge, but following a STB strategy makes some sense for Jump TV, who have clearly found their internet TV subscription model difficult to monetize – offering a STB tends to tie in viewers more and is perceived to carry greater value.

There is also the potential to widen Jump’s sports portfolio through NeuLion’s relationship with organisations such as the NHL.

View original here:
More Merger Mania

Now, I know that you’re all spent the weekend wondering about the various technologies used in mobile communication networks, so let me put you out of your misery with this table, courtesy of Adobe, who clearly see mobile as their next target market:

Of course, all of this is rather theoretic and my own experience on 3’s HSDPA network has been highly variable.

Contention is a particular problem and technologies such as CDMA are based on a degradation of service, so as more users use the service, the bandwidth available goes down.

Not included in this table are technologies based on the WiMax spectrum and related technologies which are much lower cost to deploy and promise greater user latency.

Using mobile services whilst stationary present a different challenge to using mobile services whilst on the move and WiMax is likely to take some years before it offers the latter capability.

There is a third alternative for mobile TV services which is already in widespread deployment whereby the data channel and the video channel deploy different technologies – basically you have a TV tuner in your phone alongside the mobile chipset.

But the biggest barrier to the development of this industry remains the oligopolies being run in telco markets around the world. It’s a big bet, high stakes industry and jumping on the bandwagon ain’t so easy.

Read more from the original source:
Mobile Max