This weeks latest round up of OTT Video news, deals, launches and products from the team behind Faultline.
It was a few years ago at IBC that we first saw ADB’s Graphyne UX system, and although it may have other customers, the order this week at Transvision, Indonesia’s pay TV platform is the first we can find that has been announced publicly. Transvision is a DTH provider and GraphyneTV will be used for its VoD suite to a multiscreen environment. The service is also said to use recommendation, monitoring and audience measurement, but does not say which software it has selected for these.
Indian video streaming service Hotstar is a long term user of Akamai’s CDN and has extended its contract to use it for live sport using Akamai’s Intelligent Platform. Hotstar launched last February and has seen a dramatic growth in viewership on the back of 65 million downloads and a content portfolio that covers local and international drama, movies and sports. This was about preparing for the ICC Cricket World Cup Twenty20 competition in India. Cricket is India’s national sport and this year it saw a peak of 1.55 million concurrent video streams, and peak traffic doubled to 1.3 Tbps.
Last week the Altice-Cablevision merger was given the go ahead by the New York State regulatory panel, which will go to a final vote on June 16, which seems to be a formality. Most Cablevision service is within the New York area. The panel recommended conditions be imposed to retain customer-facing jobs at the current level for four years. The FCC and Justice Department have already signed off on the deal, so this is the last hurdle for Altice.
Cox said this week it will extend fiber to the node and deploy DOCSIS 3.1, working towards a node-plus-zero architecture that allows fiber to the home, at gigabit speeds. It plans to a commercial trial of DOCSIS 3.1 in the fourth quarter, with deployments set to take place between 2017 to 2020. It is likely to use Arris and Technicolor for the devices. It will also begin deploying CCAP, but has no plans to enter the mobile market through the MVNO option it has with Verizon.
The Swiss Competition Authority has imposed a 71.8 million Swiss Francs fine against telco Swisscom for anti-competitive behavior in pay TV sports rights, specifically football and ice hockey, and has refused rivals the chance to show many of the games, including UPC Cablecom and even then had to bundle it with a Swisscom Teleclub package.
To pay down government debt, the Greek government will transfer its 5% ownership in Telco OTE, which is controlled by Deutsche Telekom, to the state privatization fund Taiped, which will then keep 1%, and transfer the rest to the Social Security Foundation. Deutsche Telekom has used a successful strategy of buying 40% to 50% in local eastern European telcos leaving the remainder to local businesses and governments, which they can then sell off at a profit after it works it magic and improves finances. OTE also holds 54% in Telekom Romania.
SES this week said that iN Demand has renewed its satellite capacity agreement to deliver HD sports and Pay-Per-View events to cable audiences across the Americas. iN Demand has retained two C-band transponders on the SES-3 satellite over the US to deliver Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, soccer, boxing, Mixed Martial Arts and wrestling to 60 million digital cable households.
Eutelsat has signed a multi-year contract with the Tunisian Broadcasting Corporation to deliver its 10 free to air TV channels across North and West Africa on the Eutelsat 7 West A satellite.
SES has also agreed a multi-year, multi-transponder agreement with Sky Cable, a pay TV provider in the Philippines which will offer DTH satellite TV channels across 251 cities, reaching 22 million homes in the Philippines alongside its existing cable offerings. Sky Cable currently offers cable TV for 55 HD channels to 800,000 subscribers.
Researcher IHS says that TV in the Middle East and North Africa grew 10% last year when measured by number of households to 4.95 million, and it is now forecasting a CAGR of 18% and says that revenues have now passed 1 billion Euros in total and forecasts a rise to 6.54 million homes by the end of 2020, up 32%.
US researcher Technavio says that revenues in the global gaming market will rise over the next four years with growth in including peripherals, headsets, and consoles. It says that the Americas will dominate the peripherals market which will rise by due to the higher number of existing console gamers in the US. Globally this market will grow at 11% CAGR. Headsets is the second most sought after segment and here the APAC region is expected to account lead with a 38% market share. Consoles will pick up ion both TV attached and handheld owing to the technological advancements in RAM and GPU. That’s funny we thought Sony and Microsoft consoles were on their last generation?
So Huawei, the giant Chinese telecoms equipment supplier is the latest to sue Samsung in the US for patent infringement. We’re sorry but that’s about as much of a joke as patent poor Apple suing Samsung. That affair took up four years of our lives and made no difference at all. The two could not reach a licensing deal because Huawei figures Samsung owed it money and not the other way around. We’re not surprised. Samsung has worked hard to become a dominant holder of patents central to building any kind of phone or phone network, but often suffers because its patents are used within standards, and has to offer FRAND terms. So Samsung that holds far more patents, gets sued. In which case what’s the point of having patent law? The suit is filed in San Francisco in the US and Huawei claims Samsung infringes 11 patents related to 4G industry standards, which are surely FRAND too. Will history be re-written and will the Chinese monolith which came late to cellular telephony, end up being remembered (alongside Apple) as the inventor of the smartphone.
NTT Docomo says that it has achieved a wireless real-time transmission of 8K video using what it calls 5G mobile, in a trial conducted with Nokia. It used an experimental system jointly developed by Docomo and Nokia, using HEVC encoding from NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories. The system uses beam-tracking and millimeter waves up at 70GHz. The 8K video began at 48Gbps and was compressed down to between 84 Mbps and 145Mbps. We hate 5G, it’s nonsense and just a science experiment, anyone can get that bandwidth using off the shelf WiFi.
There were reports this week of the French authorities raiding Google‘s Paris offices as part of a tax fraud investigation. Local newspapers reported that 100 civil servants descended on the premises, including 25 IT specialists and five financial magistrates. Given that everything that Google knows about the internet, it is either not guilty or has learned not to write anything down. We suspect this is just meant to put pressure on Google to give the French authorities more than the UK authorities got out of it. Currently it is seeking €1.6 billion from the group. The UK got just £130 million.
There is definitely a bidding process going on in the background at Polycom, a company that mostly makes teleconferencing technology. We can’t understand it because its systems are massively expensive and holding the industry back. First Mitel Networks was bidding and now an unspecified private equity group, which reports in the press suggest it is a local private equity group. The company has decided to put aside the Mitel deal for the present and explore the second offer from the mystery bidder, which now values the company over $2 billion in total value. It consists of a cash dividend of $11 a share the purchase of $650 million in new convertible preferred stock to land it 56% control. All over a position in teleconferencing that will be disrupted totally by software only solutions, the cloud and faster broadband in under 5 years.
The European Commission has gone and ahead and signed a directive making OTT services source at least 20% of their content locally. This does not mean European-wide content. It means 20% from the local country, in each country. This legislation is aimed at Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video, but it may end up putting obligations on Liberty Global’s Horizon Go, and on services like Magine, and Canal+ Whatever and CanalPlay, and MTG’s Viaplay. It is a revision to the EC Audiovisual Media Services Directive. Was this put in play due to France’s anger over Netflix not setting up inside France, in order to avoid its draconian rules on VoD services and local production targets. We thought European rules were supposed to be for the good of Europe, not the good of France.
US researcher ABI Research says that encryption has eliminated nearly 60% of the video and audio optimization market in 2015. Cellcos used to take unencrypted video and crush it, to create slower ABR services using special DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technology or something similar. We always said that as this gets encrypted it becomes tough, if not impossible to do. The report says “We expect 85% of traffic to be encrypted. But that leaves 15% that can be optimized, and that is a significant network load.” Most social media services do not encrypt and are the most wasteful of cellular resources, so ABI may have a point.
Meanwhile ABI has another report out which forecasts that the 4K set-top box market will quadruple from now up to 7 million devices in 2016, and then grow by 46% annually through 2021. But during this same period the set top market will be in decline in terms of numbers shipped. ABI says in revenues terms it will mean a fall of 9% to under $16 billion in revenue, across both pay TV and free-to-air boxes. Of course free-to-air analog to digital efforts are part of the reason, as most major countries are through them. ABI points out that Huawei has just gone past the $1 billion revenue barrier and is eating into more traditional suppliers such as EchoStar and Humax. China now takes more set tops than anyone, with India second and the US now third due to the partially successful Indian digital cable transformation.
Comcast is now limiting its broadband overage charges that any single home can pay in a month to $200. Very kind of it. Or is it? Comcast last month raised its cap to 1 TB, from 300 GB per month. Perhaps it is trying desperately to avoid further government interference in its broadband business.
France Telecom owned content protection specialist Viaccess-Orca will include the NexStreaming NexPlayer SDK into its Connected Sentinel Player in Android and iOS mobile apps. It says this is all about adding rich analytics and to support cross-device advertising.