Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
While the US is said to be separated from the UK by a common language, it was not always like that, and in 1903 the US Ford Motor company which had just set up that year, began selling cars in the UK. One man bought a dozen Ford cars to the UK and tried to sell them and it took a whole year. A Paris operation was set up in 1908, and by 1911 Ford set up a UK factory just 8 years after it was founded and it went on to be one of the largest car brands in all of Europe. In an identical fashion, China’s Xpeng has now begun selling its P7 cars in Europe, in Norway…
Many B2B technology subsidiaries of pay TV operator giants have struggled to hit the ground running, for numerous reasons. Comcast Technology Solutions is a prime example of a vendor that has labored to break out of its parent’s shadow and make a real impact beyond its primary business of supporting legacy TV operations of smaller regional operators – and change has been a long time coming. With a view to fully replacing its decades-old satellite-based managed service for content acquisition and distribution, Comcast Technology Solutions has released a new Managed Terrestrial Distribution service – forging a path to IP video using ground-based video infrastructure. Done right, expenses reductions for customers can be significant. While this is a natural evolution from…
Huawei’s HarmonyOS is seen as the only credible challenger to Android and iOS in the mobile operating system duopoly, even though the prospects of this third-horse outsider will be limited almost everywhere except China. However, if you look hard enough, you can just about make out another horse coming up the rear, in the form of KaiOS – a Hong Kong-based outfit founded in 2018 with ambitions of stealing market share from Android in developing regions. Given this target market, hearing that the Linux-based KaiOS is making strides in the US, riding a wave of rising video app usage on the platform, therefore caught us off guard. This comes in the form of a partnership with multi-cultural on-demand programming provider…
Utility broadband was a very hot topic a few years ago, fraught with threats of lawsuits, local political turmoil, and consumers that were tired of being underserved by the largest ISPs. While expanding into broadband – the most modern utility – was perceived as a golden opportunity, progress appears to have been slow. EPB in Chattanooga was something of a posterchild for the trend, and was met with legal challenges by Comcast and AT&T in 2014, after the municipal utility sought approval for a FTTH network. The pair claimed that there was no demand for the EPB service, but a study in 2015, from the University of Tennessee, said that Chattanooga’s Gig City initiative, fueled by the EPB network, has…
Of all the technologies that make up the media and entertainment space, digital security has – ironically – been one of the most vulnerable to the economic impacts of Covid-19. By the same token, it has become cliché to generalize content security and anti-piracy as afterthoughts, but when your industry was on the backburner long before the pandemic, then panic-stricken budget-squeezing and supply chain slowdowns are always going to hit you hardest. Yet you wouldn’t notice any signs of recent market turbulence from digesting the latest Kudelski Group results. The Swiss firm’s Digital TV sector has pulled off a masterful turn of events in the first six months of 2021, building on momentum seen in the second half of 2020.…
It is reassuring to see that the tide might finally be turning against Nielsen. Despite every respectable mind in media knowing that it is no longer up to the job of accurately measuring video consumption, it has been widely accepted that the giant is just too large to dispose of and too old to tame. So, naturally, Faultline’s heart pounded at the sight of NBCUniversal causing a stir. The Comcast-owned network has implied that it is considering implementing multiple measurement benchmarks, so it looks as though Nielsen is likely being shoved down the pecking order. In a recent blog post, NBCUniversal says that it is currently amid the process of “assembling a full suite of interoperable measurement solutions that are…
Ligado Networks, the USA’s would-be wholesale 5G network operator, has announced a co-development deal for 5G base stations, with Open RAN provider Mavenir. The two companies said in June that they would partner on O-RAN compliant remote radio units (RRUs) and cloud-native O-RAN software, to run in the L-band satellite spectrum in which Ligado aims to deploy its network. Ligado recently secured 3GPP approval for official 5G specs to support L-band, and it says its work with the standards body will also contribute to coexistence efforts between satellite and terrestrial networks in many markets. In March, Ligado committed itself to support the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), which aims to provide a pre-integrated platform for Open RAN. However, the primary RAN…
One of the fears about the USA’s deteriorating relationship with China, which has resulted in intensifying sanctions against Huawei, is potential disruption to standards processes and international cooperation in organizations such as 3GPP. That could delay or weaken future 5G and 6G standards, and even lead to the mobile world splitting into two regional camps, with a return to the old days of GSM versus CDMA. While initial fears, back in 2019, were somewhat allayed when US and Chinese engineers were allowed to attend meetings alongside one another, the risk of a split into two sets of standards, and two incompatible ecosystems, remains real. That would reduce the economies of scale for operators and vendors, limit access to innovations from…
Qualcomm’s third drone platform is the first to incorporate 5G as well as support for ML (machine learning) inferencing, reducing power consumption and bringing closer full remote high performance flying beyond visual non-line-of-sight (BVLOS) operation. It also underlines the opportunities commercial drone flying holds for mobile operators, with Verizon a launch partner for this new Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G platform on its public 5G network in the US. The aim is for the platform, which can operate in millimeter wave spectrum, to be available via Verizon’s Thingspace Marketplace. The reference design is on pre-sale release now, with the development kit slated for Q4 and the first commercial products based on the platform scheduled for release mid-2022. According to Qualcomm, the…
Chips that can support two of the most demanding and high-profile processor use cases – 5G and advanced AI – at the same time have been among the most-hyped technologies of the past year. The company that has achieved the highest recognition among a host of start-ups targeting this dream is EdgeQ, which is now sampling its first products for 5G infrastructure, and claims to have its first design win with “a large North American OEM”, which has committed to productizing the EdgeQ chip. There were no more details about that deal, but the company has released more information about its 5G base station-on-a-chip, which consists of a physical layer (PHY) product with software stack. It is based on an…
NEC and Fujitsu bid to standardize Open RAN interoperability testing globally Japanese operators and vendors have always produced highly advanced cellular technology, but this has largely stayed within the home country, and within the highly customized networks of MNOs such as NTT Docomo. With the advent of Open RAN, however, all this is changing and Japanese suppliers are bidding for global presence, heavily supported by their government, which sees the chance to build a 5G/6G industry with international impact, around a ‘Japan-first’ platform and ecosystem. The most dramatic example has been Rakuten, which has not only set up a fourth MNO and deployed a cloud-native open 4G/5G RAN, but has now set up a vendor called Symphony to commercialize the…
Dish has singled out enterprise private 5G for fastest growth towards its ambition of becoming a major fourth US mobile operator alongside Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. The rationale is that although its rivals are also targeting this broad and diverse sector, the timing is right for an emerging operator in a field that is itself in its infancy. The hope is that some enterprises will be more open to overtures from a smaller operator offering competitive services carved out of its own emerging public infrastructure. Dish is setting out its stall as a provider of dedicated network slices aimed primarily at smaller enterprises, rather than cases where spectrum is set aside for networks fully owned and managed by the customer.…
We have often analyzed how telecoms operators will need to expand their services portfolio if they are to justify the investment in 5G networks and in the migration to cloud-based architectures. But identifying new services that rely heavily on 5G, in order to monetize the new networks effectively, is not the only challenge – tough as it is for operators that have built their success on generic voice and data rather than a broad diversity of targeted offerings. With most of these new opportunities lying in enterprise, IoT and B2B sectors, rather than with budget-conscious consumers, operators will also need to adapt to a new ecosystem. Very few will be able to address a significant number of enterprise use cases…
Five years ago this week… Then Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was offered $72 million to step down, opening the door for a reputable replacement at one of the most world’s powerful content businesses. While much of the coverage focused on how much Dauman had profited from digging his heels in, Faultline noted that this was a Mote in God’s Eye compared to what Viacom could be worth if it were to finally embrace OTT. Certainly, with Dauman gone – the man who had tried to turn the tide of the internet by suing it – that door swung open. — Organizers of the upcoming Las Vegas-based tradeshows NAB and CES have announced that proof of vaccination against Covid-19 will…
Announcing that advertisers should start committing a considerable 40% share of TV ad budgets to OTT, when today’s average is just 14%, raised more than a few eyebrows at this week’s Stream TV Ad Summit. Of course, as the event name suggests, no speaker from the panel that followed was going to disagree with Justin Evans, global head of analytics and insights at Samsung Ads. His company’s reasoning is that streaming-enabled homes are being starved of impressions, while homes without smart TVs or connected TV devices are a shrinking pool of opportunity. David Porter, SVP and GM of Addressability at dynamic ad insertion company Canoe Ventures, was the only panelist to directly address this hypothetical 40% ad streaming budget target,…
Confronted with hordes of torch-bearing consumers sick to the teeth of buffering and log-in issues, HBO Max is finally facing up to its video QoE woes as WarnerMedia is promising to switch out every single connected TV app over the next four or five months. That’s great news, unless you are one of several million subscribers not streaming HBO Max on CTV devices. From a technology perspective, the HBO Max upgrade pledge will finally allow the You.i TV technology to reach its full potential – and about time too after AT&T completed the $100 million acquisition of the Canadian UX engineering expert in December 2020. While WarnerMedia executives have spent more time making excuses than changes, it is true that…
ExxonMobil is in disarray, despite delivering bumper second-quarter profits and surpassing analyst expectations. Having enjoyed the reopening of the global economy and a surge in oil demand, all while OPEC+ supply curbs remain in place, investors remain unimpressed with a muddled transition strategy that spells dark times ahead for what was once the world’s largest company. ExxonMobil posted a $4.69 billion profit during the second quarter of 2021, driven largely by higher oil prices and its petrochemical and international upstream divisions. A turnaround from a $1.08 billion loss in Q2 2020, the quarter represents the company’s best quarter since before the Covid-19 pandemic decimated global oil demand last year. “Positive momentum continued during the second quarter across all of our…
Five years ago this week… Amino launched its first software-only contract with tier 1 Hong Kong operator PCCW, which hopped aboard the former’s Enable software platform. This provided a layer of software below the middleware, so that PCCW could adjust the middleware and UI on its existing footprint of Now One UHD set tops to roll out the 4K version of Now TV. Amino inherited Enable with its 2015 acquisition of US-based cloud TV company Entone, which alongside another acquisition of Swedish OTT system Booxmedia, saw the company move aggressively into software. This software-led M&A charge was clearly a trend of the time – as in the 12 months prior, Arris acquired Pace, and Technicolor acquired Cisco’s set top business.…
Population: 84,339,067 (+1.09% vs 2019) GDP per Capita (Nominal): $8,599 (-6.7% vs 2019) Debt to GDP: 39.5% (+6.9% vs 2019) Turkey – as it sits ablaze with wildfires – is today’s poster child for the devastating impacts of climate change. With the growing pressure for the country, which remains as one of just six that have yet to sign the Paris Agreement, to adopt policies to prevent both the cause and consequences of global warming, so too does a wave of urgency behind its transition to a decarbonized energy system. Since its economic crisis in 2001, Turkey’s economic and social development has been swift – with both GDP and population set to grow through to 2050 at…
ATP Media, the broadcast production and distribution arm of the ATP Tennis tour, is one of many media companies smugly celebrating its early migration to the cloud that helped it weather the storm of Covid-19 trends – starting circa 2015. Yet ATP Media is not your run of the mill media company. As well as supporting broadcasters with multi-platform production for IP video and satellite TV distribution around the globe, ATP Media also operates its own D2C OTT video platform called Tennis TV, which it claims is complementary not competitive to the broadcast offering. On top of that, and key to its transition away from satellites and on-site equipment, ATP Media has invested heavily in fiber network infrastructure. ATP Media’s…