Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
With $110 billion due between 2023 and 2033, the NFL appears to be in no hurry to jump to a direct-to-consumer OTT service. The pay TV channel is still far too valuable to ditch, but opening the door for the broadcasters’ streaming services is helping to cover the bases, in case pay TV suffers a colony collapse. The main question here is how much of the price rise can be attributed to inflation, and how much is being pegged to the new access that the broadcasters have secured for their streaming services? This new round marks the first time that a streaming-only non-TV broadcaster has been picked. This is, of course, Amazon Prime, which from 2023 has the exclusive rights…
Despite some early technical hitches that left us no option but to moderate the entire 1-hour Faultline Video Summit this week over a 4G connection using a Huawei smartphone, the event was one that stimulated open discussions and encouraged a roaring audience Q&A session. Deutsche Telekom, Irdeto and Technicolor were out in force presenting views and strategies on RDK as well as Android TV Operator Tier – given DT’s penchant for both – providing the perfect follow-up to our previous event with Proximus, as we made the journey from Belgium into Germany. The event can be viewed on-demand in its entirety here [insert link pending?], while we have listed some bitesize takeaways for the time-constrained Faultline reader: The one stop…
With the pandemic pulling technology trends forwards by a decade or so, a procession of buzzwords have blossomed as a result. Microservices has been one of the most prominent of trends to climb the ranks of company priorities over the past year and is arguably the only broader technological transformation occurring right now that is capable of moving mountains in media and entertainment. However, there is an assumption that wide adoption of microservices could decimate vendor communities, as customers seek best of breed alternatives to monolithic systems, which is a misconception that needs nipping in the bud. The opportunities for smaller vendors transitioning product portfolios to microservices are just as great as for the media conglomerates, operators, broadcasters, and internet…
Deutsche Telekom expands data sharing in automotive and smart city Deutsche Telekom has upgraded its projects around data sharing across the automotive supply chain and smart cities sectors in Europe. The telco said that membership of its Catena-X Automotive Network (Catena-X) project, announced late 2020 to facilitate secure data sharing across the German automotive industry, has been expanded. New recruits include Mercedes-Benz, BASF, Henkel, Schaeffler, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Fraunhofer Society, and the ARENA2036 research factory, among others. Besides DT, other leaders in the project include Bosch, BMW, SAP and Siemens, aiming to identify production bottlenecks or parts shortages, and avoid production outages of the kind experienced during Covid-19 lockdowns. Nokia wins five-year C-band equipment deal with AT&T…
Xilinx’s new FPGA-powered Smart Network Interface Card (NIC) announcement opened the door for an introduction to Mipsology, a start-up that provides a software abstraction layer that it claims massively simplifies programming for the hardware acceleration silicon. Specifically, Mipsology is focused on video and images, and such services should facilitate increased adoption of FPGAs in core video workloads. The headline news was that Xilinx had unveiled its new Alveo SN1000 Smart NIC – the evolution of the NIC that connects servers together and to the outside world. It incorporates a 64-bit 16-core Cortex-A72 ARM CPU into the design, to run the additional application code that sets a Smart NIC apart from a regular NIC. However, a new set of services and…
Rakuten has pledged to make open RAN architectures easily accessible and deployable, even by operators without significant engineering teams and budgets, by packaging up pre-integrated combinations of hardware and software. It launched its Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) in late 2019 with this aim in mind, building on its own network architecture, intellectual property and deployment experience. This month, it has added its latest vendor partner, Airspan, to the platform – which also works on joint sales and go-to-market strategies. The RCP concept has gained strong support from Telefónica – though that alliance, in itself, gave rise to fears that the dreams of a fully open RAN market might be compromised in the interests of convenience. Rakuten set out a fine…
Claiming the high ground in virtualized and open RAN and core is a key element of Nokia’s turnaround plan (see separate item), and certainly of its messaging. To strengthen its claims, it has announced strategic alliances with all three webscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – at the same time. Just as its large telco customers are increasingly joining forces with these cloud giants in order to enhance their economics and their enterprise proposition, so Nokia is doing the same. The webscale relationships will help it to scale up its cloud-based enterprise 5G business, while adding a new dimension of multicloud support for those business clients. The new deals with all three companies are heavily focused on vRAN…
Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark presided over his first Capital Markets Day last week and used it to provide more detail behind the turnaround plan he has been setting out since he took the helm last August. In November he announced a top-level reorganization that ditched a strategy based on end-to-end networks in favor of reverting to a heavily 5G-centric approach. Heavy emphasis was put on investing to reverse mistakes of the past, notably the failed 5G base station chip platform, which is steadily being replaced with a new more efficient and cost-effective system-on-chip. But the new approach also looks to build quickly on areas of success and differentiation for Nokia, such as enterprise cellular and cloud-based networks-as-a-service. Announcing the 2020…
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has published its annual medium-term outlook for oil, with a supply and demand forecast through to 2026. After years of overestimating the role of fossil fuels in the future energy mix – and underestimating renewables – the term ‘peak oil’ is finally part of the organization’s vocabulary, but the proposed date of this tipping point is still wildly conservative. In characteristic fashion, the International Energy Agency’s forecast is edging towards the truth, but still refuses to acknowledge the extent to which the energy transition is accelerating. The report, entitled Oil 2021, largely focuses on a world bouncing back from Covid-19. But with both supply and demand rising in tandem, the sustained surge in oil prices…
California’s NEM 3.0 has been on the cards for several years now, with its original due date pushed back several times. Now California’s three big, traditional utilities have played their hand, proposing several massive changes that would greatly shore up their own finances, but which would threaten to cripple the rooftop solar market. Hearings and a decisions from the regulator are only few months away, and inevitable policy changes of one kind or another will go into effect from January 2022. Southern California Edison (SCE), Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDGE) have submitted a joint proposal to the California Public Utilities Commission which would place more grid maintenance costs on the backs specifically of…
We could brainstorm a long list of companies that this time last year would probably not be in positions to be pondering acquisitions, but have successfully surfed the Covid-19 video wave to the point where writing checks is necessary to maintain momentum. One of those is remote production specialist LiveU, which has followed up a phenomenal year for the industry it serves by snapping up UK-based reseller Garland Partners for an undisclosed fee – in a deal that throws down the gauntlet to manufacturers of products supporting SRT, RIST and Zixi. Garland has wasted absolutely no time in filling its website store with LiveU products, effectively cutting off Garland as a channel partner for rivals by making it a LiveU…
Israeli ad tech vendor Aniview came to our attention when a press release landed in the Faultline inbox noting that the company had just unveiled its connected TV and OTT capabilities, which struck us as rather belated. While the company had been preoccupied with mobile advertising, in a market as hot as ad tech, vendors need to be ahead of trends, not behind them. Speaking to Faultline this week, the company’s CTO, Roy Cohen, explained that Aniview had been able to support CTV and on-demand advertising for a while, but guaranteeing security for its clients was the main hindrance. That would explain the company’s recent partnering with fraud detection unit, White Ops. “We had our own security solution for our…
Xilinx’s new FPGA-powered Smart Network Interface Card (NIC) announcement opened the door for an introduction with Mipsology, a start-up that provides a software abstraction layer that it claims massively simplifies programming for the hardware acceleration silicon. Specifically, Mipsology is focused on video and images, and such services should facilitate increased adoption of FPGAs in core video workloads. The headline news was that Xilinx had unveiled its new Alveo SN1000 Smart NIC – the evolution of the NIC that connects servers together and to the outside world. It incorporates a 64-bit 16-core Cortex-A72 ARM CPU into the design, to run the additional application code that sets a Smart NIC apart from a regular NIC. However, a new set of services and…
Faultline tuned into a webinar this week featuring executives from Deutsche Telekom, RDK Central, Broadpeak, and Wyplay, which excelled in terms of content but transpired to be an anticlimax once it was clear there would be no audience Q&A. Next week’s Faultline Video Summit, featuring a different Deutsche Telekom speaker, alongside Irdeto and Technicolor, will not make the same mistake. We did, however, learn a lot about where Deutsche Telekom stands on the tradeoff between unicast and multicast. Pedro Bandeira, VP of Product and New Business at Deutsche Telekom Europe, explained that the transition to unicast is an integral part of the operator’s long-term shift to all IP infrastructure. By Bandeira’s reckoning, going to unicast helps an operator like DT…
Synamedia is taking steps to address what is the single biggest barrier to its future success as a video technology business, and something that Faultline has often floated as a long-term cause for concern. This is about Synamedia’s legacy reputation among pure play OTT video outfits that continues to hamper it from being considered a credible supplier to companies born in the internet era. There is no overnight fix, yet Synamedia has got off to an unconvincing start. To answer to this conundrum, Synamedia unveiled a new modular suite of data-driven SaaS services during the company’s first virtual press conference of the year this week, under the umbrella of Synamedia Go. This is the latest stage in Synamedia’s broader cloud-based…
Biden maintains Trump’s Huawei hard line Clear evidence that President Biden will maintain the hard line on Huawei set by his predecessor has come with extended restrictions on companies supplying items that can be used with 5G devices made by the Chinese vendor. These changes could disrupt existing contracts with Huawei agreed under earlier licences that have now been amended. Neither side has commented, but the actions bring older licenses more into line with the tougher policies implemented in the waning days of the Trump administration. While Biden may mollify the tone and not impose further restrictions, he seems set on sustaining the constraints imposed by Trump. Booz Allen Hamilton lands $600m contracts for 5G testing in USA The US…
As large operators in western Europe and Japan become increasingly enthusiastic about open network platforms such as Open RAN, it sometimes seems as though the US majors, which were early drivers of the disaggregated open platform, have become less supportive. However, judging by recent comments from AT&T and Verizon, that is not the case. Both are making significant progress in deploying RAN, core and transport networks based on white box hardware, edge computing and cloud-native architectures, and both expect this to start having a visible impact on their cost base and service agility from 2022 or 2023. But where they do diverge from the European giants like Vodafone and Orange is in having a lower focus on multivendor networks that…
Airspan, the venerable supplier of mobile network equipment, is to go public for a second time, riding the wave of interest in Open RAN platforms. Founded in 1998 as a spin-out from DSC Communications, Airspan focused on fixed broadband wireless systems and increased its prominence when it entered the then-hot WiMAX market in 2005. However, after the economic crash of 2008, it delisted from the Nasdaq exchange in 2009, when Oak Investment Partners took a majority stake. But after a period of falling revenues and of losses, it is experiencing growth again, and sales are expected to rise by as much as 47% in 2021. This time it is not going public via a traditional IPO but using a mechanism…
While parts of the world obsess over whether Huawei is safe to deploy within 5G infrastructures, others quietly get on with deploying its products. This is certainly the case for Huawei’s Distributed Massive MIMO (DM-MIMO) package aimed at indoor deployments, which is being rolled out by China Unicom at numerous public and enterprise sites, including stadiums and railway stations. Quiet seems to be the operative word since Huawei has said little about the technology after a brief flurry of publicity almost a year ago in April 2020 when the company revealed the fruits of collaboration with Unicom by launching their joint DM-MIMO package. This was based on Huawei’s existing Lampsite Digital Indoor System (DIS), incorporating MIMO antenna arrays of up…
There is almost a feeling of crisis among mobile operators over private 5G as they fail to be included in the majority of networks deployed by enterprises so far. The situation can only worsen further as other players including the Internet technology giants players get stuck in, as well as IT system providers like IBM and HPE. At the same time the infrastructure providers, especially Nokia and to an extent Huawei, are sensing blood themselves and cutting deals directly with enterprises, bypassing their operator customers. Operators therefore have to invest and position themselves to be relevant, whether they are providing private network services in licensed or unlicensed spectrum. The key question for operators is what they can offer enterprises that…