Cisco May Cut 5,000 Jobs

Speculation on how hard Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) will swing the axe leads off today's cable news roundup.

Cisco could eliminate about 5,000 jobs this August, about 1,000 more than the number cited earlier this year, according to Gleacher & Co. analyst Brian Marshall. A still-undisclosed number of Cisco employees opted for the company's earlier retirement program ahead of the coming layoff. Cisco will provide more detail about its workforce moves on its Aug. 10 fourth-quarter earnings call. (See Cisco's Early Retirements Begin and How Deep Will Cisco Cut? )

There may be quite a few companies interested in buying Hulu LLC , but Netflix Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX) isn't among them, reports The Wall Street Journal. Those with interest include Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) and DirecTV Group Inc. (NYSE: DTV), the paper says.

For those still keeping score, the top 10 incumbent cable MSOs had deployed 582,000 CableCARDs for use in retail devices at the end of June, just 46,000 more since the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) 's last report in March. By comparison, those MSOs had deployed more than 29.3 million operator-supplied boxes with the security modules, about 2.3 million more since the last report.

Netflix is giving discs some much-needed love via a new US$7.99 per month unlimited DVD-only rental plan that doesn't include the company's streaming video component, NewTeeVee reports.

HTML5 adoption continues to heat up, with 69 percent of H.264 video now offered for playback in a format that's being aided by the popularity of devices such as the iPad, according to a MeFeedia report that analyzed 30 million videos from 30,000 websites. (See The iPad: a Threat to Flash's Video Dominance? )

The Zatz Not Funny blog finds signs that DirecTV's new, but long-delayed TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO)-powered box could start showing up this month.

— Steve Donohue, Special to Light Reading Cable, and Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable