Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
BMW, Mercedez-Benz, and Volkswagen have signed a ‘strategic alliance’ with fellow German giant Thyssenkrupp, to jointly take licenses for cellular patents. The four firms will create an “Automotive Licensing Negotiation Group,” which (most unusually) will then attempt to secure more favorable terms for its members than they may hope to secure by themselves. This approach, if successful, could easily spread to other sectors of the wider technology industry. Existing contractual agreements are unlikely to be affected, but if the group can prove to the world it can secure more favorable terms, the landscape could be severely disrupted. However, European political bureaucracy must be considered, as it is still very unclear how this German decision can or will be adopted among…
It is a golden summer in the northern hemisphere for private 5G in major sporting events, which has come of age to support broadcasters providing diverse and high quality outdoors coverage. Operators are also eager to show off their ability to establish temporary wireless connectivity wherever it is valuable, including major construction sites and music festivals. Private 5G was deployed for the PGA Championship Golf tournament, one of the sport’s four majors, held in the USA in May. It is also currently serving German broadcaster RTL for coverage of the ongoing Euros football tournament in Germany. But the biggest sporting deployment of private 5G so far will be for the 2024 Olympics Games in France starting on July 26th. Orange…
Airbus, airline SAS, Vattenfall, Avinor, and Swedavia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on developing infrastructure for hydrogen aviation in Sweden and Norway. This has important implications in the grand scheme of sustainable aviation in Europe as the Nordic countries show a lot of potential for domestic low-carbon aviation due to the range and speed of the current fleet. This partnership will conduct a feasibility study across over 50 airports in both countries. The study, lasting a year with potential for extension, will assess scenarios for hydrogen-powered aircraft integrations and the necessary hydrogen storage at airports. The shift to hydrogen is vital for the aviation sector’s energy transition, requiring airports to adopt new procedures related to refueling,…
Five years ago this week… Comcast saw cable rivals Cox and Charter join its On Addressability initiative, attacking the addressable marketplace from the standpoint that it should begin with the content distributors—framed as the only way to enhance the entire advertising ecosystem. Faultline found that a little arrogant, considering that On Addressability was essentially Sky AdSmart in disguise. Comcast had previously integrated AdSmart assets with NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio, aiming to provide better international reach and measurement for brands, forming an advertising monster feasting on data from 50 million set tops. That data was then fed into an AI-powered contextual media planning tool for TV. Just 35% of content publishers would use 5 or more CDNs for a large-scale live event, down from 57% in 2022. However, this spikes sharply to 81% of content…
Since late 2021, Meta has been building a new in-house audio codec, and finally has something to show for it – unveiling the Meta Low Bitrate audio codec, aka MLow. The big tech company, which has famously championed the AV1 video codec and co-founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), intends to improve audio quality during real-time communications (RTC) while using native voice functionality inside its family of apps – such as voice calls over WhatsApp, or a live broadcast on Instagram. MLow achieves 2x better quality than Opus—the open source audio codec released back in 2012—while keeping computational complexity 10% lower than Opus. Meta’s new audio codec innovation is already fully rolled out on Instagram and Facebook Messenger, while…
Gracenote’s FAST Program Lead Adam Tenorio took a page out of social media’s playbook, suggesting that the free ad-supported streaming TV format should emulate the attention-devouring platforms, designed to keep users perpetually engaged. This fuels the debate around the TikTokification of TV, which is great in theory, but in practice very few video experts have the answers. Might Gracenote offer some solutions? During an OTTx webinar entitled “Why metadata is the key to FAST Channel Success”, Tenorio pointed to playing content from the moment of launch—emulating what happens when users open certain social media apps like TikTok. Tenorio stressed that engagement is high when a service is being turned on, and auto-playing content from the jump would maintain engagement levels.…
As audiences are tuned in for a summer of sports—starting with the ongoing UEFA Euro 2024 soccer tournament—the issue of live latency is opportune. Hence the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) recently released a topical report covering the methods for measuring live latency across the streaming chain – from the encoding stage all the way to client decoding and rendering. We’ve previously touched on how the “noisy neighbor” argument—repeated ad nauseam over the years as a reason to improve latency, is essentially dead because everyone—including your neighbor—has moved to the same OTT page. Push notifications from social media, news, sports, and betting applications (not to mention group chats) can now however have that same experience-ruining effect. As well as sports,…
Declining SVoD net adds in the US, coupled with record-high cancellations, have panicked subscription-based OTT video services into a retention and monetization frenzy. One strategy that has worked and presents a viable solution, according to recent Antenna data, is bundling. Also, price hikes have been a success, apparently not detrimental to subscriber net additions overall. This stems from the recently released State of Subscriptions report for Q2 2024, covering pricing and packaging ending in March 2024. The report states that net adds have fallen for the first time below 5 million since 2022, and Antenna measured its highest cancellation rate ever at 50.4 million for Q1 2024. The 33-slide presentation argues that as video streaming is reaching a level of…
We’re pretty sure that if you ran a poll of where priorities lie in the video industry, forming another industry alliance would be pretty low down the list, if not rock bottom. Nevertheless, industry alliances continue to be born at a rapid rate—usually a sign that technology companies are huddling together for warmth to weather an ongoing storm more than evidence of fierce innovation. But not always. Newly delivered by the stork is the XR Sports Alliance, a joint effort of chip giant Qualcomm, video experience developer Accedo, and HBS, a sports broadcaster turned consultancy. The XR Sports Alliance is not an athletic branch of the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion (although Stockholm-based Accedo does cosplay as Greta Thunberg from time…
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where creatives and advertising types meet, is not a media industry event that has ever appealed to Faultline. This year, however, an unusual smattering of invites came our way and piqued some interest; not enough to make a last-minute trip over to the South of France, but enough to pencil it on the events calendar for 2025. This is evidence of the media industry’s tectonic plates shifting around, as content makers and technology companies alike lean inevitably into advertising for monetization. There are deep macroeconomic factors in play here to explain why the media landscape is increasingly leaning into advertising, but we will not dive down that rabbit hole today, but instead focus…
M&A, IP, Patents Zegona Communications plans to cut more than a third of Vodafone Spain’s workforce, up to 1,198 people, days after the acquisition was completed. Zegona is confident it can return the former Vodafone subsidiary to growth. Mexican billionaire and telco investor Carlos Slim has bought a 3.16% stake in BT, via his investment firms. This acquisition makes Slim the third-largest shareholder in BT, behind fellow billionaire Patrick Drahi, who holds a 24 % stake via his subsidiary Altice UK, and Deutsche Telekom with a 12.06% share. BT shares rose at least 4% on the news. Vodafone Group is reportedly seeking to sell its 21.5% stake in India infraco, Indus Towers, for $2.3 billion to pay off part of its €33.2…
Apple has unveiled its Apple Intelligence strategy, adding some very low-stakes improvements to its iOS platform, and opening the door for third parties via a deal that integrates OpenAI’s ChatGPT into the Siri virtual assistant. Siri improvements and AI-powered emoji generation are quite drab, but will not damage the Apple brand, while RCS messaging support will eventually solve a few networking headaches for operators. Crucially, no money is changing hands in the OpenAI arrangement. From what the press has managed to report, OpenAI is banking on the consumer exposure alone, and whatever improvements it can make to its system based on usage data. ChatGPT was made publicly available in November 2022. It has improved since then, in terms of hallucinations…
Mavenir, a big name in Open RAN, is seeking to apply Generative AI to encourage deployments by reducing the burden of operational support and service assurance. It has been collaborating with AWS and Nvidia to develop its Operations Co-Pilot for RAN Service Assurance platform, designed to identify potential network issues, speed up problem resolution, and where possible automate troubleshooting. While the platform claims to work for any operator, those with Open RAN will likely derive the greatest benefits. The platform will cut operational costs by reducing manual debugging, as well as shortening lead times for development and maintenance, with the benefit of enhancing IT operations and service availability. The software is part of Mavenir’s network intelligence-as-a-service framework, which uses AI…
There is an industry consensus that the past year has been a rough one for Open RAN. So said the title for our most recent webinar, where we put the question of progress to a panel of insiders. It was clear that there had been some setbacks, but the trio agreed that this was not simply confined to the Open RAN segment. The webinar featured Gilles Garcia, Senior Director Data Center and Communications Group, at AMD, John Baker, SVP Business Development at Mavenir, and Viraj Abhayawardhana, Director Mobile Access Strategy at Liberty Global. When asked about the progress of the past year, Garcia pushed back on the idea that it had been a rough year for Open RAN, as the…
Digital transformation means getting rid of manual tasking so that networks become self-managing, and network managers can play a passive, observational role. Prodapt’s Head of Product Consulting, Paul Termijn laid out his views on the pitfalls preventing some operators from this renaissance. At a recent Rakuten Symphony event, the RAN-focused software vendor shared the stage with another telco services provider and IT firm, Prodapt. The decision to join forces with Prodapt may be a sign of a new strategy from Rakuten Symphony to extend its role to be a systems integrator, rather than a sole vendor. Regardless, the event led to discussion of the much-needed digital transformation of networks. The telco sector, typically slower to adopt systemic change than other…
The campaign to generate revenues by exposing mobile networks to developers and potential customers through network APIs depends on reaching critical mass. For operators, this means collaborating more closely with peers in other countries and even rivals within their own markets to enable API based services on a large scale. Technology and equipment vendors meanwhile must oil the wheels and help their telco customers package their capabilities attractively for developers in the first instance. Such capabilities revolve around QoS and SLAs, bringing in 5G network slicing, as well as security and authentication to minimize user friction without increasing risk. Nokia claims to have taken a significant step forward with the launch of its Network Exposure Platform, which it insists is…
There is an awkward tension in the mobile sector. Operators decry the notion that they are ‘dumb pipes,’ simply utility providers of connectivity, and complain about falling revenues. But in the same breath, they say it is impossible to make the systemic changes needed to evolve their businesses. Those who continue to focus all their efforts on reducing cost-per-bit will only be left behind – and may even end up in the hands of hungry private equity investors. One of the often-used complaints of MNOs, and one commonly heard from the Telefonica pulpit, is that data consumption is rising inexorably. The Spanish-headquartered multinational wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that “every year data traffic grows by 30%. It is a…
Ad fatigue due to ad repetition is a trend as old as TV, let alone the internet, so why is it that in 2024—with the advent of programmatic and targeted advertising capabilities—that ad fatigue is still a rampant trigger for churn? Some think humans are the issue, and believe a revolution in artificial intelligence is the answer. We are noticing a trend of emerging start-ups in the ad tech scene, offering AI-based algorithms for improving the way ads are inserted contextually and irregularly during ad breaks on FAST and AVoD platforms. One of those is BlimeyAI, a UK-based two-man-band emerging out of stealth mode, which is hoping to secure its first customer contract at next week’s Cannes Lions International Festival…
Everyone likes a good deal, and Amazon is no exception. After playing a year-long waiting game over the purchase of Indian ad-supported OTT platform MX Player, the tech giant is reportedly on the verge of buying some of its key assets—notably the content library—for less than $100 million. With this move, Amazon takes advantage of a tumultuous Indian streaming industry to gain a bigger foothold in the country by growing its roots outside of India’s largest urban hubs. In addition to is Prime Video subscription service, Amazon has since 2021 operated a free, ad-supported platform called miniTV exclusively in India, available in the country’s Amazon shopping app and browsers. Although details are sparse, and the deal is not completed, the…
You wouldn’t know it from the predictable headlines covering Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC)—brainwashed by the uninspiring privacy-focused Apple Intelligence updates—but it was actually Apple’s TV business line which kicked off proceedings in Cupertino at the start of this week. “Let’s talk about Apple TV+,” came CEO Tim Cook’s opening gambit. Cast aside from Cook’s WWDC presentation were gory details including a small but significant update that Apple’s HLS now supports the Common Media Client Data (CMCD) standard. As defined by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)’s Wave project, CMCD enables video players to send information to CDNs with each object request – allowing CDNs to support quality of service (QoS) monitoring and delivery optimization. CMCD was popularized after its unveiling…