Today, AMD revealed that it sold its Digital TV business, that came with its ATI acquisition, to partner and rival Broadcom for $192.8 million in cash. That's below the $250 million to $375 million that analyst firm American Technology Research predicted last month in a report. ATR also believed AMD should sell its cell phone chip business too.

Last week at the Intel Developer Forum, I also learned that HP's MediaSmart HDTV (pictured) business is kaput, unable to make a dime in this cut-throat business. HP was at the mercy of Asian manufacturers that would suddenly rise the price of flat-panels and could not pass it on to consumers inspite of MediaSmart TVs connectiveness. HP is now turing its hopes in MediaSmart Connect set top boxes instead. But for how long? To me that's just another version of the Windows Media Extender principle that Microsoft is pushing for over 5 years and always failed!

Talking about HP, I also heard from a Polycom executive that HP might also pull out from its telepresence business i.e Halo. More on that on a later post with the Polycom interview.

That leaves Intel's Eric Kim, the head of the company's Digital Home Group with his "I Love TV" campaign. Intel's Digital Home Group is actually a misnomer as it *lost* its "consumer PC business" to Pat Gelsinger's "Enterprise Digital Group", probably after the Viiv fiasco.

Intel should really rename its relaunched Digital Home Group the Digital TV Group and hope it doesn't turn out to be another "Connected Product Division" which started in 1998 and that sold consumer electronics products like Web tablets, mouse, keyboards, digital cameras, audio players... i.e. until October 2001 and after over a billion dollars in operating losses. Ready for another cycle?