Dish Network ended 2019 with under 12 million total TV subscribers, leaking 194,000 connections in the fourth quarter and 336,000 for the full year period. The Dish TV satellite service itself shed 511,000 subscribers last year, falling to 9.4 million, which was offset partially by Sling TV gains of 175,000 in the year, climbing to 2.6 million subs. While damning, it marks a significant slowdown from the 1,125,000 who cut the Dish Network pay TV cord in 2018.
Disney’s research division has flexed its muscles with an AI-enhanced video compression model developed together with the University of California. While not a totally unique technique, the Disney Research says it has achieved less distortion and smaller bits-per-pixel rates than other compression methods. Research team leader Stephan Mandt said, “If I’m allowing for larger file sizes, then I can have better image quality. If I want to have a short, really small file size, then I have to tolerate some errors. The hope is that our neural network-based approach does a better trade-off overall between file size and quality.”
Deutsche Telekom ended 2019 with 3.6 million TV customers in its native Germany, growing 7.9% year on year across IPTV and satellite TV services. Broadband subscribers were virtually flat at an annual growth of 1.2% to 13.7 million. Outside of Germany, TV subscriber bases grew modestly in some regions including Czech Republic (up 73.3% to 149,000), Slovakia (up 2.9% to 635,000), Hungary (up 6.4% to 1.16 million) and Greece (up 2.4% to 553,000), while subs dipped in others like Austria (down 4% to 433,000) and Romania (down 8.5% to 1.32 million).
Swedish video streaming vendor Net Insight posted its first set of results since selling the Sye OTT synchronization product line to AWS in December, showing net sales of $10.7 million in Q4, down slightly by 0.7%. Sye’s departure came at the cost of net income (loss) which tanked to -$2.8 million for the fourth quarter, compared to net income of $0.2 million in Q3. For the full year, net sales incurred a minor blip of 0.2% to total $45.8 million, on net loss of $3.3 million, including the Sye business. Net Insight made $37.2 million from the Sye transaction.
Interestingly, Net Insight expanded its support for AWS rival Microsoft Azure this week, making the Nimbra Edge product available on Azure for the first time. The vendor says this enables media companies who want to run on hyperscale cloud infrastructure like Azure to do so while connecting their media equipment to a low-latency contribution and distribution platform.
Spanish national broadcaster RTVE has rolled out optimized video tagging technology from data-driven video software vendor Jump. The Jump AI Engine applies machine learning techniques to address RTVE’s tagging requirements in its extensive audiovisual catalog. Jump uses deep learning models including computational linguistics, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), You Only Look Once (YOLO), Neural Networks, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Naive Bayes, OneHotEncoder, Feature Vector Extraction, video and audio conversion algorithms, and video frame division algorithms – all of which it highlights have been optimized and verticalized specifically for the video entertainment industry.
German commercial broadcasters RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 should be allowed to merge, according to Thomas Rabe, CEO of German media titan Bertelsmann, who called for regulators to loosen their grip on consolidation in the face of global media competition. Bertelsmann owns a majority stake in RTL and has been gradually increasing its share in the company, so no wonder Rabe is trying to orchestrate some sort of deal.
Come 2023, the digital divide will have shrunk significantly as two-thirds of the global population will have internet access, rising to 5.3 billion users in three years’ time from approximately 3.4 billion users in 2016, according to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report. Findings show that average broadband speeds will rise from 46 Mbps to 100 Mbps by 2023, while connected devices will peak to 29.3 billion and two-thirds of connected flat screen TV panels will support 4K content.
Japan’s Rakuten TV has added an AVoD channel to its offering in Spain, produced with famous Bristol-based studio Aardman Animations, among others.
Sony Pictures Television has invested an undisclosed amount in a UK sports production company called Whisper, which focuses on sports entertainment shows.
Luxembourg-based edge storage company G-Core Labs has opened a new hosting point in London, marking its 24th global facility. The new location boasts an average response time of 19ms, claiming to have one of the best connections on the local market today which will become part of G-Core Labs’ global CDN infrastructure.
Visual processing vendor Pixelworks is developing some sort of hybrid OTA-streaming technology using 5G-based fixed wireless access equipment from Qualcomm. The joint system will combine Pixelworks’ XCode processor with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G Modem-RF System, designed to allow ISPs and OEMs to develop and deploy a home video system to combat cord cutting.
Google’s recently forged gaming deal to license media rights from Activision Blizzard for esports events on YouTube is valued at $160 million, according to multiple sources cited by Esports Observer. YouTube will become Activision Blizzard’s exclusive global streaming partner, excluding China. Esports tournaments such as Overwatch League, Hearthstone Esports and the newly created Call of Duty League will be live streamed on the service.
Apple has stated that it will no longer be able to meet revenue expectations of between $63 billion and $97 billion for this quarter, thwarted by slower production as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak.
Chinese semiconductor maker Xilinx says it has added advanced machine learning capabilities to its range of professional video and audio devices for the broadcast market. Cost reduction is the greatest driver for ML adoption in this market – covering encoding, intelligent digital signage, automatic object tracking and speech recognition.
Liberty Global’s Virgin Media wants to explore strategic partnerships in the UK market to offset a sliding pay TV business and a flat broadband market. This could come in the form of a fixed-mobile network venture and restructuring project. “Fixed-mobile combinations are materially accretive operationally and financially to our core cable platforms”, said CEO Mike Fries, who pointed to the VodafoneZiggo joint venture as an example.
Samsung is introducing AI-based Smart Screen capabilities to its latest line of TV sets, using Quantum Dot technology and its 8K processor to upscale content for display across 33 million pixels. A new Active Voice Amplifier will reduce background noise.
Bahrain Telecommunications has upgraded its Batelco TV platform with French multiscreen software firm Vianeos, rolling out a new UI with intuitive graphical layout. Batelco TV blends IPTV and OTT onto its own legacy AOSP set tops.
Vivendi-owned video platform Dailymotion has begun selling ad inventory on connected TV sets via its proprietary ad platform. Dailymotion says its connected TV app opens up access to over 2,000 content providers.
Cable-owned ad tech firm Canoe Ventures registered 27.3 billion VoD ad impressions during 2019, rising 4% from the previous year and up from 6.3 billion in 2014. Canoe is a joint subsidiary of US cable trilogy Comcast, Charter and Cox.
Russian OTT video platform Okko has selected a vendor called SberDevices to manufacture its new line of set tops, mostly made in China. The new Okko hardware provides access to Okko’s online movie offering and comes with recording storage and a voice remote.