Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
US operator WideOpenWest (WOW) had the last word of 2020 in the heated Android TV Operator Tier space – rolling out its platform (almost) country-wide at the tail end of December. It reaffirms the cableco’s commitment to video services after WOW, like most operators last year, spoke strongly about growing the broadband-first business as video product offerings were deemphasized. Android TV is again being floated by Faultline as one of 2021’s markets to watch, just as it has been for the past three years or so, on each occasion surpassing almost all industry expectations as the technology takes on new personas. The latest and arguably most disruptive since the transformation into Operator Tier, is the new Google Broadcast Stack, which…
Among the flurry of festive deal-making, two vendor wins stuck out from the crowd for us, with Anevia and Velocix each inking important customer wins to close out a momentous 2020. In a year that saw the two video CDN specialists transform to great effect while being pushed closer together, we expect players in this market to explore alternative avenues in the year ahead, such as advanced advertising technologies, to win business in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. A sign of the times in OTT video delivery software? Such trends were bubbling away long before Covid-19 was a household name, which culminated in Velocix being spun out of Nokia and Anevia being acquired by French compatriot Ateme – critical moves which…
It comes as no surprise that 2020’s box office takings were historically bad, but what seems worse is that SVoD channels might not be its savior. Globally, box office revenues were down 70% compared to 2019, with North America seemingly hit worse, on a drop of 80%. In 2020, North American takings were just $2.3 billion, down from 2019’s $11.4 billion haul – marking the lowest result for forty years. For the total international box office, 2020 revenues are expected to finish between $11.5 and $12 billion, down from $42.5 billion in 2019, based on Comscore’s data. Due to Covid-19, China took the top-spot in global rankings, with $2.7 billion knocking the US into second place. The Eight Hundred was…
Impressed by cross-platform app-creation credentials, AT&T’s WarnerMedia completed its acquisition of Canadian UI developer You.i TV while Faultline was taking a winter break. As an existing customer stroke investor in the business, WarnerMedia will drive You.i TV head-first into HBO Max’s 2021 expansion plans, kicking off the new year where it ended the last – in sending seismic cinematic shifts the world over. “A company fixed on a collision course towards disruption” was how Faultline described You.i TV upon the vendor securing a $23 million funding round back in November 2018, itself coming two years after a $16 million injection. Our reasoning was simple, recognizing the demand for dedicated video streaming app development tools without overreliance on major OS platforms.…
While CES is accustomed to being the inaugural major technology event of the year, this year, however, the world’s largest consumer electronics event finds itself in unfamiliar territory – hosting its debut all-digital show months after most. All eyes are on CES to start 2021 with a bang. Of course, event organizers have benefited from substantially more preparation time than the major events throughout 2020’s panic-strewn calendar, yet CES is a show like no other – where gadgets, gizmos and monolithic TV sets take center stage ever year on the show floor. Transitioning a show like CES to a virtual experience therefore offers greater challengers than the software-centric shows of the video entertainment and communications sectors, so CES 2021 will…
Qualcomm claims solution to smart city monetization riddle Qualcomm claims to have cracked the code for smart city service monetization with a full-stack, modular plug-and-play IoT package for cities and associated verticals. The chipmaker contends this reduces complexity and provides a practical foundation for technology sellers and buyers to start obtaining a return on their investments. As Sanjeet Pandit, senior director of business development and global head of smart cities at Qualcomm, put it: “Cities don’t have a clue how to make this stuff pay. With this, the technology becomes self-sustaining and the investment covers itself – and they get to offer services that benefit citizens.” Qualcomm has laid out steps that city administrators and their technology or infrastructure providers…
Hotspot Network, a network-as-a-service (NWaaS) provider, is working with telco MTN and open RAN vendor Parallel Wireless to roll out cellular networks to 2,000 villages in Nigeria. Morenikeji Aniye, CEO of Hotspot, said the aim was to establish 500 open RAN sites in the first year, primarily supporting 2G and 3G at first, with some 4G. Parallel has a ‘AllG’ platform that, unlike some open RAN platforms like Samsung’s, has support for pre-4G cellular networks. Hotspot Network provides managed services to operators, including building, operating and managing towers and infrastructure, and it will also be the systems integrator for the open RAN roll-out. About 25% of the funding for the 2,000 sites will be provided by Nigeria’s Universal Service Provision…
NEC has been designing high end radios for years, but almost entirely for Japanese operators. Now, it is taking advantage of open RAN initiatives, and the push by MNOs and governments for a broader supplier base, to broaden its geographic reach. Its O-RAN radios were developed, in its traditional manner, in a very customized way for Japanese operators (Rakuten and NTT Docomo). But it will work with Rakuten to commercialize their radio (and core) co-developments for wider adoption via the Rakuten Cloud Platform, and NEC is also working with other technology partners and operators round the world. Last month, it set up its first Global Open RAN Center of Excellence to promote its platforms to operators and work with partners.…
The year ended as it had begun, with an intense focus on open RAN platforms and the prospects for a multivendor, disaggregated 5G architecture and ecosystem in the coming years. Mavenir, one of the companies in the emerging US-centric group of challengers supporting O-RAN platforms, took further steps into hardware, highlighting the concerns, held by many operators, that it may not be practical to mix and match radios and baseband virtual network functions (VNFs) in many scenarios. But the association of O-RAN with the USA, beloved of some US politicians and the Open RAN Policy Coalition, is far from assured. Mavenir itself is working with a Taiwanese radio partner, MTI (as is the USA’s Dish Network), while Japan’s NEC is…
Mobile operators are well aware that edge computing brings opportunities for recouping their investments in 5G infrastructure by generating new revenues from enterprise-facing services. They are also aware that they face competition in this sector from unfamiliar directions, including the big cloud companies, systems integrators and traditional big iron data center technology players, like IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fujitsu, NEC and Dell EMC. There are also the telco infrastructure vendors cutting out their operator customers by targeting enterprises, as we pointed out last week in the context of private networks where Nokia has a division dedicated to such direct engagement. Often these players form alliances and this will be essential for MNOs given their lack of all-round expertise in edge…
The prospect of robust high performance indoor communications over mmWave frequencies has been raised by recent results including some from the Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP), a group of operators and technology vendors collaborating on open networks. The appeal is the huge amount of potential bandwidth available, dwarfing both the lower cellular bands and WiFi. The latest WiFi 6E, which extends the previous WiFi spectrum from the previous 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands into the 6 GHz range, liberates an additional potential contiguous 1.2 GHz between 5.925 GHz and 7.125 GHz, otherwise being identical to WiFi 6. By contrast, mmWave at the higher frequencies can yield effectively limitless bandwidth and already both the USA and China are on course to…
In our final edition of Wireless Watch for 2020, we take our second look back at the key events, for the cellular industry, of this strangest of years. This week, we make our selection of the developments on which we commented in the period from May to August, not necessarily highlighting the biggest headlines, but the stories which we feel will have lasting resonance going into 2021. In the first issue of 2021 – to be published on January 11 and covering the first 11 days of the new year – we will make a selection of the key trends of the last four months of 2020, and provide some predictions for 2021, though perhaps recent experience suggests that making…
Five years ago this week… Alcatel was the first out the gate, claiming that its virtualized home gateway plan was ready to take the broadband market by storm, with live implementations expected in early 2016. The company argued that applying network function virtualization (NFV) to the home gateway could reduce operational costs for ISPs by up to 40%, although this was more like 25% for premium services. Based on the Broadband Forum’s Network Enhanced Residential Gateway (NERG) initiative, the basic idea was for the home router to become a home bridge, with routing, management, troubleshooting, QoS controls and policy all migrating to the cloud. This raised questions as to which CPE manufacturer would be willing to marginalize its profits in…
Akamai’s State of the Internet reports are always worth digesting, but this year has been something of an anomaly, which makes looking backwards tricky. Drawing comparisons from the data can be risky, and reaching the wrong conclusion is certainly possible. However, the growth of SVoD services that have been outlined in the reports of our research arm Rethink TV suggest the volume of malicious logins that Akamai is observing is only going to grow. As more people sign up to Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, using the same passwords they use for other online accounts, the chances that their credentials will be leaked or stolen rises. A striking finding from the latest State of the Internet shows that one single…
Six months after Faultline’s exclusive scoop and at least one month ahead of schedule, MediaKind has entered the Android TV arena with Mediaroom Play. The launch comes just in time for MediaKind – but will this be the final evolution of the Ericsson spin off’s once much-adored Mediaroom technology? Mediaroom being on the ropes is not exactly an industry secret. Many operator customers could simply not afford the jump to MediaFirst, the fully virtualized cloud-based TV platform technology for pay TV operators. This gulf between the two technologies has drawn the gaze of Mediaroom customers to Android TV Operator Tier as an alternative and a natural next step in the evolution of in-home entertainment. This culminated in the creation of…
You know that feeling when a sports commentator repeats your critical analysis or under-the-breath comment of a match word-for-word, leaving you convinced just for a moment that the room is bugged? Well, Faultline felt something strangely similar while talking to the co-founders of JW Player this week, as a company that has seemingly absorbed so much of our advice since its inception in 2008 – emerging unscathed from a period of OTT commoditization that claimed many of its counterparts and rivals, to the back-end streaming force JW Player is today. For our final interview of 2020, this was a perfect way to bow out. Without any prompting, CEO and co-founder Dave Otten echoed one of our observations from last week…
Faultline has picked up on a few breadcrumbs of information relating to the royalty licensing scheme for LCEVC (low complexity enhancement video codec) – discussions which developer V-Nova has been closely guarding long before the technology was given the standardization stamp of approval last month. Back in July, the UK-based compression vendor taunted royalty-free licensing models (namely AV1) for not being true to their word. As we keep being told, open source and royalty free are not the same thing. The likes of the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) can claim a royalty free model until the cows come home, only then to argue that patents are invalid or third-party examiners are wrong. V-Nova has therefore claimed LCEVC would be…
Whether commenting on the video industry, or the wider world, how can one sum up 2020 without cliches? Seismic change ran in tandem with literal standstill, opening the opportunity for commentators such as Faultline to scrutinize further the cogs whirring behind every product announcement, misstep, partnership, quarterly results filing, and acquisition. Long-term readers will have noticed that the make-up of our own content has shifted too. Undoubtedly, this year saw a greater focus on advertising technology in Faultline than any year previous, and this was no coincidence. Many were calling this ‘the year of AVoD’ back in January, while February saw media giants such as Comcast, Fox and NBCUniversal circling AVoD upstarts Xumo, Tubi and Vudu. Of course, the historic…
How do we even begin to summarize 2020? Perhaps the best way, in true Faultline fashion, is to look forwards, rather than backwards. The good is news is glaring. The vast majority of companies in and around the video streaming world we call home have experienced record growth over 2020, which most will sustain through 2021 and beyond. Not just surviving but thriving during a pandemic is a major statement of intent for the future of the entertainment ecosystem and all her interconnected parts – a message which the Faultline team has been busy emphasizing throughout this year from multiple angles. The bad news, however, is that 2021 will be a much harder pill to swallow than 2020 for many…
ExxonMobil has finally buckled to investor pressure and – despite its Climate denying views – has pledged itself to some level of emission reduction. While no promises have been made to reduce oil production, the company now aims to reduce per barrel emissions by up between 15% and 20% by 2025 – compared with 2016 levels. This comes as shareholders continue to raise concerns about the company’s environment impact, including the Church of England, which became the latest to join calls for new directors and a transition to cleaner fuels last week. It is worth noting that the target only applies to scope 1 and 2 emissions and will not address the scope 3 emissions that occur when consumers burn…