Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… After the launch of the 8K Association at CES 2019, there was a hint of backlash against the group at the NAB Show, months later. With TV manufacturers infamous for prematurely promoting technology—or even erroneously as with 3D TVs—OEMs were again guilty of pushing 8K before its time. The association was absurdly prompting “service providers (especially OTT) to develop 8K offerings,” as part of its immediate objectives—at a time when there was no standard for the technology beyond headline resolution, while manufacturers ploughed their own furrows in an attempt to tilt the early market in their favor. The 8K Association still stands today. A bill has been signed into US law that will outlaw TikTok in the United States,…
Growth stories may have been hard to come by from the usual suspects at the 2024 NAB Show, but one surprise expansion encounter came with Techex – a company undergoing something of a renaissance. With focus on the US marketplace, there are evident greenfield opportunities, but success will be judged on the ability to poach customers from Zixi, among others. Techex, an expert in IP video cloud distribution and transport gateways connecting stadiums and such to studios, has recently planted its first US-based business, and plans to grow from 50 people today, to 80 personnel by this time next year to support its uprising in the US market. Boasting practically every major UK broadcaster on its client roster – BBC,…
The ATSC pavilion has been one the buzzier places at recent NAB Shows, once you have successfully avoided the gravitational pull of the traffic-sucking AWS citadel. This year’s event saw the ATSC 3.0 upgrade accessory receivers released from the confines of the glass cabinets seen at NAB 2023 – giving attendees access to demos for the first time, many eager to know when ATSC 3.0 will be available country-wide with all the bells and whistles. One of those bells is HDR, with the ATSC camp coining 2024 “the year of HDR”. This was the first NAB to feature a demonstration of ATSC 3.0 with HDR for live TV, showing the Kentucky Derby – in what is a critical milestone for…
One prevailing takeout from the recent NAB Show is that monetization concerns have only increased since IBC 2023 last September, and so have forecasts of consolidation. Vendors – not only in the usual Faultline remit of the West hall but in the South and Central halls too – were focused intently on showing prospective and existing customers how to scrape out every last cent. While AI was predicted to be the dominating theme at the show, we instead saw a maturation of services to favor “agents”—assistants with more practical uses, even if less revolutionary. Another common showcase was AI translation and transcription demonstrations, with the likes of Netint and Cognizant among those promoting such features. We hear from Norsk, a…
We at Rethink have extensively covered China’s dominance of solar and EV (electric vehicle) manufacturing. For both, that dominance is long-established, it is if anything still tightening, and it is based primarily on undercutting production costs. In both industries the Chinese have also now acquired at least the kind of technological lead that you would expect from the country that produces and consumes more of these products than the rest of the world combined. For wind, the picture of Chinese dominance is subtly different, in that the wind industry is older, and China has so far “only” taken over 65% market share, not 90% like in solar. That’s despite – or perhaps because of – wind being a much older…
Results from Ericsson and Nokia, the two Nordic beasts of mobile infrastructure, have often been out of sync historically for various reasons, but have come more into line for their first quarter of 2024. Both companies have posted disappointing sales but healthy order books that they promise will produce a much stronger second half of the year, barring further seismic geopolitical shocks. The question remains though whether the putative second half recovery will be sufficient to counteract the first half slump, given that some vendors have been predicting an overall shortfall for the year. Among those is transport networks vendor Ciena, which less than a month ago was the latest in a string of large telecoms suppliers to announce disappointing…
The ETSI ISG MEC working group has unveiled the final set of Phase 3 specifications and announced significant progress on Phase 4 of the framework for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). The results are pitched as critical for supporting the GSMA’s Operator Platform Group (OPG) requirements for multi-operator inter-MEC communication. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) does what it says on the tin. The MEC Industry Specification Group (ISG) has announced that the latest Phase 3 specification ‘contains the updates related to the latest alignment with the 3GPP on CAPIF’ (the Common API Framework), as well as new Federation Enablement APIs. Each MEC component is assigned a particular number, within the ISG. The CAPIF work was done inside the MEC 011…
The move by Microsoft and Siemens to converge the two leading languages used for creating and executing digital twin models into a single environment has ramifications for almost all industry sectors that involve design, simulation and testing. This includes mobile operators, since the promise of 5G to deliver on-demand and automatically provisioned enterprise services across multiple networks – tailored to specific scenarios requires simulation of real world environments accurately and quickly. Digital twins can increasingly enable the required capabilities with AI techniques coupled with advances in computational power. But this also calls for a common language to develop digital twin models around agreed interfaces and components or objects. An essential ingredient, often referred to metaphorically as nouns, are the object…
The mood at FutureNet World’s latest network automation conference in London was of intense focus, as delegates from the telecoms sector desperately sought ways to efficiently automate their networks, capitalize on AI, and ultimately lower their operating costs in a low growth environment. There will be a more extreme divide between the haves and have-nots, as operators with enough funding can invest and transform their networks into automated, cloud-native platforms that will create opportunities for revenue, and those that can’t are left behind. One of the main draws of the event were the financial benefits to be had in improving network automation and AI, and the opening keynote panel on the second day dived straight into the topic. “We’re under…
The GSMA and ETNO have announced their support for a new industry report, published by the European Council, and are now calling for EU member states to enact its recommendations. Unsurprisingly, while it has a noble ambition, the underlying premise that businesses will be the driving force for such geopolitical visions is misguided at best, and foolish at worst. The GSM Association (GSMA) and the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO) say that the report’s declaration that “a healthy and secure electronic communications sector is crucial for the green transition, innovation, and the resilience of the Union,” is a welcome declaration. However, examining the track record of European operators is not exactly solid evidence for the points made in the…
Five years ago this week… The involvement of V-Nova‘s Perseus technology in the working draft of MPEG-5 part 2 was revealed. Faultline uncovered some of the reasons behind factors that have kept Perseus’ customer list at a minimum. Notably, Perseus was bashed by encoding vendors on the premise that the technology was commoditization encoders, and was therefore a threat to the business to the likes of AWS Elemental, Ateme, or Harmonic. Some 62 Perseus projects were underway at industry giants including Twitch, CNN, and Facebook. The 2024 NAB Show was a year of firsts for many walking the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, with more than half (54%) of the trade show’s 61,000 attendees listed as “first-time attendees”, according to the organizers of…
As sustainability concerns dried up in the Nevadan desert, a new wide-ranging green organization launched in December 2023 was attempting to spread its wings at the 2024 NAB Show. Those wings were clipped by the emphasis on AI at the show, with Ad Signal’s CEO, Tom Dunning, telling us outright that “AI is the biggest threat to our sustainability goals”. On the eve of the trade show’s grand opening, members of the press and sustainability-concerned attendees witnessed a series of talks from the Media Tech Sustainability Series (MTSS). It culminatied with a brief introduction to the recently formed Digital Sustainability Alliance (DSA), announcing a partnership with the MTSS. Faultline, ever eager to inspect every sustainability shrub in the mostly apathetic…
After Roxi, a UK-based music connected TV app, announced it was launching the first interactive music channels for ATSC 3.0, we have learned that the company’s FastStream Technology will be deployed with all members of Pearl TV, the collaboration of US broadcasters. As a recap, when a user tunes into the IP video stream of one of Roxi’s interactive channels, FastStream downloads—without user intervention—a transient app in the background that allows the time-shifting functionalities on the music channel to be activated within a matter of 3 seconds after the user begins watching the channel. If the user flicks channels, the app is deleted, and will be re-downloaded on return to the channel. Both Roxi CEO Rob Lewis and CTO William…
As Faultline previewed AI video indexing offerings allowing semantic search features before the 2024 NAB Show, we saw a host of propositions similar at first glance. Dispersed within the South Lower and Upper halls, we spoke with four companies offering video indexing services built from proprietary AI models, namely French Moments Lab (née Newsbridge), object storage company Wasabi, promoting its newly launched AiR (AI Recognition) product, Californian Twelve Labs, and finally Perifery, with its Intelligent Content Engine (ICE). The latter is the new kid on the block, and it showed at the show. Most of these companies name tools like AWS Rekognition or Google Vision as their competitors, and believe their own offerings sit in separated silos from the competition.…
In the world of contribution dominated by SRT (Secure Reliable Transport), proprietary protocol Zixi and Vizrt-owned NDI 6 are shaking things up, with RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) plugging aways in the background. Having achieved the basics, Zixi is cleaning house, making enhancements and improvements. Zixi announced efficiencies to its transport protocol as part of the 17th iteration of its software-defined video platform, using less bandwidth by compressing null packets in video streams. With architecture updates, throughput has risen by up to 200% to 1Gbps per core. Zixi also emphasizes Total Cost of Ownership, offering 14 times less compute compared to open source offerings. These efficiencies offer Zixi a sustainability argument, a byproduct being marketed at the 2024 NAB…
One of Faultline’s first-time encounters at the 2024 NAB Show came with Codec Market, pitched as the first AI-optimized video cloud acceleration offering, and one of several to have taken a residency spot inside V-Nova’s LCEVC booth area at this year’s event. The start-up has been around since August 2018 but is on a marketing drive, to help in the effort of raising capital from investors, as Codec Market looks to expand its scope and onboard new clients. Founder and CEO Daniel Summer brings extensive background experience in computing and stakes a claim to building the world’s first CDN – although not the only engineer with this achievement on the résumé. Pitched as a next-generation video compression backend for online…
With the 2024 Paris Olympics looming large, sports were front of mind for attendees and exhibitors of the 2024 NAB Show. Further down the line, technical preparations are already being put in place for the 2026 World Cup soccer tournament, and where there are sports there is most certainly advertising. While big players like Brightcove, Harmonic, Synamedia and MediaKind were all showcasing in-house server-side ad insertion (SSAI) capabilities as part of their sports streaming processing and delivery packages, it is rare to come across ad tech specialists to have survived the evident scenes of industry consolidation. Google’s presence was notably scaled down this year, opening up a window for vendors integrating with the Google ad tech ecosystem. Harmonic showed us…
The argument between full battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plugin-hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) is one where we stand quite firmly on the side of the BEV as charging infrastructure develops. PHEVs have significant looming environmental and economic problems as consumers broadly treat them like they would a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), relying heavily on the petrol tank which is usually touted as a “backup” for longer journeys. Categorizing BEVs and HEVs is rather simple, the former can only be charged using electricity through a plug as it doesn’t have an internal combustion engine, while the latter only takes petrol which improves fuel efficiency significantly but doesn’t curb a region’s reliance on oil. PHEVs are the middle ground between these two…
The nuclear industry has been hit hard by inflation and supply chain disruptions over the past few years but that hasn’t stopped it from making big claims – alluding to COP28 showboating – about the degree of involvement it will have during the current energy transition. In spite of all that, the sector is well aware of its issues as it is constantly exploring new avenues of progress – in some cases this may seem even a little desperate due to the sheer scale of ambition. Fusion is by far the ‘silver bullet’ of the energy world, but even more apparently achievable goals like thorium used as a more effective fuel seem out of reach at times. According to the…
The past few weeks have seen the polysilicon price fall by over 10%, and the solar module price fall by over 5%, to $6.5 per kilogram and $122 per kW respectively. By the time you read this, they will likely have fallen a little bit further, with China’s twofold overcapacity, and the buyer’s market that creates, forcing manufacturers to shave off more and more profit margin so that they can be the ones still operating and selling. We expect that these two prices will fall to a little under $6 per kg and $110 per kW by the end of this year – though there may be a slight price recovery through November driven by demand, with only the December…