Five years ago this week…
The Kudelski Group was onto a winning streak in India, as its security subsidiary Nagra was selected to launch a new digital cable and high-speed broadband service for MSO Venkata Sai Media (VSMPL), the largest cableco in Southern India at the time. Nagra was to provide VSMPL its anyCast content protection and OpenTV middleware technologies, the latter marking the first time this technology was deployed on the sub-continent. India was proving most bountiful for the Kudelski Group, which had signed a deal with DishTV in the year prior to provide products for its push VoD services. DishTV held a 26% market share of India’s satellite operations as of writing in January 2016.
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US pay TV operator CableOne has rolled out all-IP video offering called Sparklight TV, developed with MobiTV, potentially as a precursor to phasing out its legacy TiVo-based platform.
Metadata specialist Gracenote has launched a Sports Widgets feature for consumer electronics makers and automotive firms to integrate real-time stats, results, and updates into video screens and in-vehicle infotainment systems.
LG has acquired a controlling stake worth $80 million in TV data provider Alphonso. The South Korean electronics giant wants to drive Alphonso’s data into realizing the untapped addressable advertising opportunity on its own smart TVs.
CommScope has launched the NVG578LX 2.5G GPON WiFi 6 residential gateway ahead of CES next week, delivering speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps down and 1.25 Gbps up.
Proximus retains the crown of Belgium’s largest broadband provider with a little over 2 million subscribers, with the majority of growth coming from FTTH, according to research from Telecompaper. It notes that an acquisition of regional cable operator Voo by Orange Belgium would hardly change the market dynamic, with the hypothetically merged entity holding 17%, while a Telenet takeover of Voo in Belgium would be more disruptive – vaulting Telenet beyond Proximus into first place.
HDR10+ Adaptive is a new specification released by Samsung and Panasonic that will adjust video brightness based on light levels in the room itself, using HDR10+ dynamic metadata and real-time ambient light data to optimize screens on a scene-by-scene basis.
Sales of 65-inch TV panels soared by 20% in 2020 while TV sets 70-inches and upwards spiked 82% towards the end of November 2020, according to research from NPD Group.
Verizon Media is developing a sociable VR experience with live sports betting in collaboration with sports gambling outfit Entain.
Sports steamer fuboTV closed out 2020 with 545,000 paid subscribers, a 72% annual increase. It expects Q4 revenue of $98 million on the top end, a 77% year on year increase. FuboTV had an exceptional fourth quarter, with its stock price spiking by 160% just before Christmas, before tanking in the new year.
Netflix’s content spend is projected to reach $19 billion in 2021, a 10% rise on 2020’s spend, according to financial comparison firm Bankr.
Media processing and monitoring vendor Telestream has added support for the latest SMPTE subtitling and captioning standard to its Vantage and CaptionMaker products. Called IMSC, Telestream says this is of particular importance in preparing IMF (Interoperable Media Format) packages, the file-based delivery format which has been standardized on by many major broadcast networks and content distributors, including Netflix.
NBC affiliate WJFW-TV, based in Wisconsin, has deployed its third PlayBox Neo server to handle content and master playout.
Spanish broadcaster RTVE has selected TVU Networks for cloud-based live video production, having live streamed a multi-camera concert from Madrid using a traditional broadcast camera equipped with a 5G TVU One mobile transmitter and three smartphones with the TVU Anywhere mobile broadcast app.
UK-based HTML5 browser developer Ekioh has previewed the next generation of Flow for the Raspberry Pi 400. The novel browser is designed for modern computer architectures, using all available CPU cores and drawing HTML elements directly on the GPU to improve rendering performance. Flow was initially designed for UIs on set tops but has since grown powerful enough to handle most modern websites.
Shortly before Christmas, InterDigital finalized development of Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) video standards at MPEG. VVC has been shown to improve HEVC performance by 50%, while V-PCC is the first MPEG compression standard for dynamic point cloud content for immersive video experiences.
Comcast’s ad tech arm FreeWheel is set to acquire buy-side start-up Beeswax to flesh out its offering for bidders while also making further inroads into connected TV advertising. Beeswax offers a ‘bidder-as-a-service’ buying model, where buyers are charged a service fee, rather than the standard commission on media purchases.
Brazilian telco TIM has become the country’s first to implement an Open Caching CDN in partnership with Cisco, Qwilt and Digital Alpha. Open Caching is the Streaming Video Alliance’s open architecture. It takes the internal content delivery infrastructure of individual service providers and forms them into a global CDN using open APIs.
Oracle uncovered a connected TV ad fraud scam towards the end of 2020, where spoofers robbed advertisers and publishers of $14.5 million in ad spend. Dubbed ‘StreamScam’, Oracle claims this was the largest CTV bot attack since the Icebucket scandal was uncovered in April last year.
Facebook’s advertising integrity has taken a blow as unsealed court documents revealed that much of its targeting capabilities have been deemed unreliable by the company, with some suggesting that the size of the failure could amount to fraud.
US Congress has passed The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act, an anti-piracy proposal that would penalize for-profit, illegal streaming services with felony penalties of up to 10 years in jail. The act was part of a larger Covid-19 stimulus bill.
Charter has doubled the starting download speed of its Spectrum Internet tier, from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps across 17 US markets, impacting around 8 million homes. A small percentage of customers will require new DOCSIS 3.0 modems to receive the faster speeds.
Global channel provider and content creator Insight TV has signed a programming deal with Indian AVoD platform MX Player. Insight TV’s content will run across MX Player’s service in India, where the country serves 200 million monthly active users, and on its international offerings in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Amazon has made its entrance into the Italian sports rights market, with Prime Video securing rights to 16 Champions League soccer games a season from 2021 to 2024.
Vodafone has made a $2.6 billion offer to buy out minority shareholders of its subsidiary Kabel Deutschland, to quash legal claims that it underpaid in its acquisition of the German cableco in 2013.
Univision Communications has announced plans to launch a Spanish-language streaming service, relying heavily on the library of Grupo Televisa – an investor in Univision.
Microsoft is exploring an ARM-based chip for its servers and Surface devices, which would be a threat to Intel’s dominance in the data center. The big question here is how well existing video workloads could be migrated from x86 to new silicon architectures.
Morgan Stanley has acquired German cableco Tele Columbus, for $516 million (€420 million).
Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley has also been enlisted by MGM to explore sale options, according to the WSJ. The studio’s vast library should be worth a tidy sum, and the move comes as studios begin tying themselves closely to SVoD services.
The systemic decline in viewers has continued in US TV networks, with the Big Four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) all declining at least 10% in total viewers and 12% in the key ad-sale demographic of 18-49 year-olds, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The first NFL game to exclusively air on a streaming outlet drew an average audience of 4.8 million viewers, across Amazon Prime Video, Twitch and the NFL and Verizon mobile apps. Regular local terrestrial broadcast increased the total to 5.9 million, and apparently 11.2 million people watched at least a portion on just Amazon’s channels.