Five years ago this week…
Modem chip start-up Sckipio looked set to give AT&T the trigger for another broadband revolution. Sckipio’s Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) in G.fast was poised to take control of coaxial cable from US cablecos and place it in the hands of telcos, with AT&T seeming to be at the front of the queue. AT&T’s average speeds topped out at 50 Mbps in 2016 – an embarrassment compared to the 300 Mbps to 500 Mbps offered by cablecos. But DBA offered a truly flexible bi-directional line, which could switch the direction of almost all its bandwidth depending on a customer’s needs. This laid the groundwork for AT&T to take over coax in MDUs, potentially expanding its static footprint of broadband lines, which had been stuck at 16 million since 2005. Sckipio has since slipped off the radar, last speaking to Faultline in November 2018, before disaster struck last year as the Israel-based silicon firm transferred 25 of its top software developers to Sequans Communications as a result of major customers halting orders during the pandemic.
—
Accedo Live Events has launched with a technology-agnostic approach to bringing live experiences across multiple platforms at scale. It sounds like something the Swedish vendor has long had in its arsenal, so what makes the Live Events service explicitly new is unclear.
Velocix has landed a massive multi-country agreement with Liberty Latin America, selecting its IP CDN, origin server and recording management server to support Android TV-based streaming services. Initial deployments are in Puerto Rico, Panama, Costa Rica, and Chile, while further market deployments are planned for later this year.
Comcast has deployed half a million more Flex devices since March 2021, taking its total footprint to 3.5 million. CEO Dave Watson has applauded Flex for reducing broadband churn by between 15% to 20%.
Belgian operator Proximus has completed the integration of Amazon Prime Video on Android TV Operator Tier set tops.
Sports-focused vMVPD FuboTV reached 590,000 subscribers as of Q1 2021, an increase of 105% over last year, while recording first quarter revenues up 135% to $119.7 million.
Brazilian operator TV Cabo São Paulo has selected encoding, transcoding, multiscreen apps, CDN, security management, and analytics all from Setplex, a US-based IPTV and OTT video platform vendor that Faultline introduced readers to only last week. The SATTV offering from TV Cabo São Paulo offers video services to more than 50 ISPs across the country.
UK-based sports data outfit Genius Sports has acquired visualization specialist Second Spectrum for approximately $200 million. Second Spectrum uses AI-based systems to track and index sports action to provide insights to teams.
What a difference a year can make for cinema. Revenues plummeted at third-placed US movie theater chain Cinemark to $114 million for Q1 2021, compared to $543 million in the year ago period. However, the company is optimistic about the road to recovery.
ViacomCBS picked up 6 million new streaming subscribers across its properties in Q1 2021 to reach 36 million – almost halfway to its target of 75 million by 2024. Paramount+ was the primary driver, while Showtime also saw growth.
The lawsuit that threatens to break Apple’s monopoly over iOS has kicked off, with Epic Games trying to convince the California judge that the 30% fee is an abuse that nets Apple $15 billion annually. Notably, the case has turned up Walmart’s now abandoned plan to launch a cloud-gaming service, called Project Storm. A class action case in the UK seeking around $2 billion in damages for app store antitrust claims has just surfaced too.
Russia’s OTT pay TV subscriber base grew 187% in 2020, says Russian consulting firm J’son & Partners. This translates to 11.5% of the total 48.05 million pay TV subscribers in the country, up from 4.4% in 2019. Unsurprisingly, the OTT-delivered subscribers drove the total pay TV count up some 8.8% year-on-year. IPTV now stands at 20% of this share, with cable on 23.3%, and DTH at 32.9%.
Vodafone Italy has launched a cloud gaming service, called GameNow, using GPU virtualization technology provided by Ubitus. The €10/month subscription will provide customers with access to some 90 games, with the line-up tailored to the Italian market.
castLabs has announced support for AWS’ Media & Entertainment initiative – a new push from AWS to create a one-stop-shop for those in the M&E market. Aimed at content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors, AWS’s new outlet will house castLabs’ content security offerings, alongside many other vendors.
Advertising platform Beachfront and smart TV manufacturer Vizio have completed an addressable campaign according to the technical specifications of Vizio’s own Open Addressable Ready (OAR) consortium. OAR’s watermark was placed within programming feeds, which were distributed to 125 broadcasting markets, and displayed on more than 3 million Vizio TVs.
Pirate streaming site 123movies.la has been shut down by global anti-piracy coalition the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). 123movies.la received an average of 20 million monthly visits, making it one of the most popular pirate streaming sites in the world.
The HbbTV Association has released the latest versions of its Conformance Test Suite, containing nearly 3,000 test cases, including tests for the new targeted advertising specification (HbbTV-TA), as well as the 2.0.3 specification of HbbTV. Also new is the Test Assertions Repository, a list of test descriptions for any vendor running a conformance regime for HbbTV compliance.
Sky Media is opening up its premium broadcaster VoD content to advertisers using The Trade Desk’s platform, marking the first time that the FreeWheel-powered inventory is available programmatically.
Eutelstat is planning to expand its Express WiFi platform to 12 Sub-Saharan African markets in partnership with Facebook. The two companies have previously successfully piloted deploying WiFi in rural areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the initiative is deployed in over 30 countries worldwide.