Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… The Secure Content Storage Association’s (SCSA) method for securely storing premium video on disk and flash memory, Vidity, was ready to go to market. It was hoped Vidity would eventually replace DVDs, so the SCSA was beginning to recruit all players in the content chain to issue licenses, which we estimated would cost around $1 per device. Vidity was set to rival SeeQVault, a chip-storage initiative from Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba that was designed around a specialist new Flash card. SeeQVault debuted at IBC 2014, but then quickly went under the radar. We said that the SCSA specification was destined to be a winner from its inception in 2012, as its development began with…
The shrinking Liberty Global empire has been a hive of activity in recent weeks. While Faultline was taking a brief summer break, the cable giant slipped in a $7.4 billion takeover offer for Swiss service provider Sunrise, flipping last year’s debacle entirely on its head after Sunrise’s repeat attempts to buy UPC Switzerland were blocked by German telco Freenet, Sunrise’s dogged majority shareholder. It caught many industry observers off guard, except here at Faultline, where we predicted this entire series of events back in October 2019, when the Mexican standoff between Liberty Global, Sunrise and Freenet reached a tipping point. We should quit while we’re ahead, but that isn’t in Faultline’s nature, so our next prediction is that Liberty Global…
What was supposed to be a routine webinar from Harmonic presenting how to cost effectively launch streaming video on cable networks, ended up being a bit of a mess. Harmonic, so used to everything it touches turning to gold, was joined this week by Jackson Energy Authority, which is where the confusion began. Jackson Energy Authority, a utilities company turned TV and internet services provider, runs a division called EPlus Broadband, which is not to be confused with the US IT assets selling firm of the same name, or indeed the German mobile operator acquired by Dutch telco KPN in 2013. Now the un-unique branding issue is out of the way, let’s dive into some technology. Harmonic has never made…
The landgrab and associated politicking for the C-band is rumbling on, but as the auction deadline approaches, the FCC has kicked another decision down the road. At stake is the question of a lump sum or a graduated set of payments, to cover the cost of moving satellite operations out of part of the C-band to make room for new terrestrial entrants and the dollars they’ll pay for those FCC licenses. Unsurprisingly, the incumbent satellite firms are in no great hurry. They are being very careful that they aren’t rushed into the wrong decision, and accountants are pulling long hours pouring over the two proposed options. This has upset Verizon, one of the firms wanting to throw its wallet on…
Adding to its already broad video portfolio, Synamedia announced a new venture into ad tech just last week, following nine months of development with existing clients. With Synamedia’s existing client base of primarily tier 1 operators and broadcasters firmly entrenched within the pay TV ecosystem, this raises questions as to whether the new ad tech direction, called Iris, will force the company to cast its net wider? Faultline put this question to Scott Kewley, the company’s VP of Advanced Advertising and Data. “Tier 1 operators are natural ground for us because of the scale they offer, but we don’t think that we should limit ourselves to just that section,” he told us. OTT, specifically AVoD, is in Synamedia’s sights, although…
V-Nova’s deal with Canadian encoder maker Netint Technologies from a few weeks back posed more questions than answers, to the extent that it distracted from a far bigger development for the vendor’s low complexity enhancement video coding (LCEVC) technology. That development is Disney. Given the pretty positive reviews so far for LCEVC, in its current pre-standardized state, Disney’s interest in V-Nova’s MPEG-5 Part 2 software is not exactly a jaw dropping discovery. No doubt Disney is the tip of the iceberg in terms of video industry titans exploring what this new enhancement codec has to offer. Derek Prestegard, a key video engineer at Disney, described LCEVC as a “fantastic technology”, specifically LCEVC with AVC, producing a ”major quality upgrade” along…
Build fixed network infrastructure and they will come, agreed one half of a panel featuring cable industry experts from CableLabs, Technetix, and Adtran, batting away notions of 5G emerging as a competitive threat to broadband. The other half, comprising execs from Liberty Global, ATX and The Volpe Firm, reserved caution that broadband players should keep a beady eye on fixed wireless access both as a challenge and an opportunity. Nervous laughter even rippled around the panel at one stage upon suggestions that everyone could retire comfortably in the knowledge that hybrid fiber coax networks will remain crucial delivery pipes in 20 years’ time. The 5G lot might scoff at these statements of confidence from the cable community, but this is…
Sumner Redstone has died, aged 97, the venerable but often controversial executive who turned a New England movie theater into a global media empire – from National Amusements, to Viacom to Paramount and CBS. If you’ve ever used the phrase ‘content is king,’ Redstone was the one who penned it. This should bring an end to the bitter legal disputes between Sumner and his daughter Shari. ViacomCBS is planning to rebrand CBS All Access, to create a product that it can launch globally. Currently priced at $5.99 per month with advertisements, and $9.99 without, the service is confined to the US. A new brand and different prices are in the pipeline. Meanwhile, ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV AVoD service ended Q2 with…
Disney has set the ticket price for Mulan at $30, and you must have an active subscription to Disney+ to watch the first blockbuster to be released direct-to-home-video since the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. Behind the scenes, things look very turbulent for the studios, and if Disney makes a success of this new distribution method, it seems that many more heads will roll. Still, there are a lot of factors in play, most of which are fairly obvious. It’s difficult to gauge, ahead of time, the enthusiasm for this model among SVoD subscribers. As it stands, for a family of four, $30 is a bargain compared to the cost of heading out to the movies, and given the pandemic, a…
With multi-CDN delivery increasingly feeling like the next big thing for live streaming video, one could be mistaken for thinking that it is sweeping across the developed world in a unified manner. Not according to Luke Durham, CTO of online video product suite, Switch Media. Durham noted that almost all Switch Media’s business featuring multi-CDN technology has taken place in Europe, as there is a relative lack of demand for the technology down under. The company has a footprint in both Europe and APAC, with headquarters in Sydney. “Multi-CDN isn’t a major feature in our region – it just doesn’t come up often,” Durham explained. “There’s less competition in Australia and New Zealand, so there’s just less incentive to…
One of the flies in the ointment for Google, in terms of its plans for mobile world domination via Android, has been the fragmentation of the user experience. It has repeatedly tried to unify this, to improve quality control, to provide predictability for users and developers, and to insist on a platform that is optimal for its services and the way it believes people should use the mobile Internet. But while it has imposed some uniformities, at least on any partner which wants to enable the core Google services on the open source operating system, the largest Android device makers have still gone their own way in terms of the user experience. Huawei, which (despite its challenges) overtook Samsung as…
The debates and disputes over the USA’s CBRS band, in the 3550-3700 MHz range, have raged for so long that it seemed the dreams of unlocking this attractive piece of midband spectrum for a wide range of services providers would wither through sheer weariness. But the three-tiered system that the FCC finally agreed with a huge number of stakeholders is genuinely innovative, if over-complicated, and is being closely studied by regulators and industries round the world. If it is a success in the USA, we are sure to see governments elsewhere emboldened to try something similar. To demonstrate the appetite for midband 5G spectrum, the auction of the licensed elements of CBRS, the priority access licenses (PALs), reached bids of…
Dish had long talked about its desire to entire the mobile game, but there’s a definite air of discomfort in the wake of the T-Mobile-Sprint deal. Dish is now being compelled to build a 5G network, in a very turbulent infrastructure market, and all the while its core satellite TV business is underperforming. To get those out of the way, Dish lost 96,000 TV subscribers in the second quarter. In Q2 2019, that figure was a loss of 31,000. However, ‘only’ losing 96,000 is a big improvement on Q1 2020, where Dish posted its worst ever loss of 413,000 TV subs. For some granularity, the 96,000 consists of 40,000 traditional pay TV subs, and 56,000 Sling TV subs – Dish’s…
Donald Trump has finalized the Arctic Refuge Drilling Plan which cements his legacy as the worst President in memory, living or otherwise. The administration will open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling just as soon as it can sell leases in the more than 19 million acres in northeastern Alaska. Democrats have a number of ways in which they can object to these including resorting to the courts once again, but Biden will have to win the White House to really stop it. As of 2022, all non-residential buildings in the Baden-Wuerttemberg State in Germany who apply for any kind of planning permission will be obliged to install solar units on the roof. This applies to supermarkets and…
JinkoSolar’s bifacial Swan Series modules will be used in the 900 MW fifth phase of the Mohamed bin Rashid AL Maktoum Solar Park in the UAE, under development by ACWA Power and Shanghai Electric for next year. CIT Group’s Power and Energy unit has served as the sole lead arranger for $162 million financing, on behalf of developer Recurrent Energy for the East Blackland Solar Project in Texas. The 144 MW project is also known as the Pflugerville project and has a 15-year PPA with Austin Energy. With the financing, Recurrent Energy has broken ground on the project. Canadian Solar has begun construction of a 5 MW commercial rooftop installation in Penang, Malaysia, with Muda Paper Mills as the offtaker.…
Canada’s Emera, an energy company with mostly gas and hydro-electric assets in Canada and Florida, has Q2 figures with revenue C$1.17 billion compared to C$1.38 billion this time last year. Net income was C$58 million against C$103 million this time last year. The company wanted to highlight the net income year to date figure at C$581 million, but given that C$305 million of that was tax recovery, that’s down to the government. It also involved some elements of the sale of Emera Maine and some property in Florida. This quarter’s numbers are more indicative. ExxonMobil has signed an agreement with Global Clean Energy Holdings to buy 2.5 million barrels of renewable diesel, every year for five years from a converted…
First Solar has sold its O&M arm to NovaSource Power, a transaction which will be complete by the end of this year. For NovaSource this will add to its prior acquisition of SunPower’s O&M division in May. First Solar is also looking into its options regarding its project development arm, and regardless of what it decides to do with it exactly, this shows that the company is focusing primarily on manufacturing, which offers it a higher return on investment than the other two arms. This means First Solar is taking the opposite approach seen with SunPower, which also had a decent Q2 result, but has been planning to spin off its manufacturing arm into Maxeon since last year, and is…
Equinor unexpectedly announced a new CEO this week, almost casually pretending that the last quarter’s results had nothing to do with it, and that this did not represent a change of strategy, post Covid, which is precisely what it is. Chairman Jon Erik Reinhardsen said, “Equinor is entering a phase of significant change as the world needs to take more forceful action to combat climate change. “The board’s mandate is for new CEO Anders Opedal to accelerate our development as a broad energy company and to increase value creation for our shareholders through the energy transition.” “We will focus and improve our oil and gas portfolio and accelerate our development of renewable energy,” he said. But praise was given to…
The USA’s cell tower operators are increasingly excited about the opportunity to drive and capitalize on high interest in edge computing. They see the chance to extend their colocation and neutral host models into cloud infrastructure, with the data centers and cell sites that they manage for MNOs also able to house edge servers – which could support telcos’ push into edge computing, or even other customers such as webscalers or enterprise service providers. However, they are moving at different speeds, and sometimes backtracking on initial pledges. Crown Castle has been the most active in this area, forming partnerships with edge infrastructure providers such as Vapor.io and Packet. But late last year, its CEO, Jay Brown seemed to go back…
The three MNOs that account for almost all of Portugal’s mobile customers have collectively announced they will not use Huawei equipment in their core 5G infrastructures. The move announced by NOS, Vodafone and Altice covers routers, servers and gateways inside the fixed backbone networks that connect to the RAN via backhaul. This is further evidence of MNOs pre-empting governments and regulators by deciding on their own to keep Huawei out now in order to avoid more costly switches towards other vendors later on. As it becomes increasingly clear the tide is flowing against Huawei in Europe at any rate, more operators are likely to follow suit by banning Huawei from their cores. This then leaves the question of whether bans…