Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Haivision, co-founder of the low latency video streaming protocol Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), along with streaming specialist Wowza, has decided to infiltrate the inhouse broadcast mobile monitoring market. Revealed late last week, Haivision Play Pro is a free mobile video player targeted at developers, streamers and broadcasters – providing the means for viewing and monitoring SRT video streams on mobile devices. Sky News and video engineering firm Cinegy are among the early adopters of Pro Play. Monitoring contribution streams and viewing return feeds in the field is a key attraction for broadcasters using the SRT protocol – whether live streams, or teleprompter feeds directly from the editorial desk, or feeds supporting remote interviews. Boasting end-to-end latency of under half a…
The mobile industry’s approach to patent licensing has made a few companies rich and dominant, but has been the source of many problems for smaller vendors, and for operators, for years. At the start of the 4G era, there was much talk of placing standards-essential patents (SEP) into more transparent frameworks than the secretive bilaterial deals, based on sometimes contradictory definitions of Frand (fair reasonable and non-discriminatory) access, the basic premise that governs all SEP. Instead, the IPR licensing costs for handset and equipment vendors rose; there was a wave of disruptive lawsuits such as those between Apple and Samsung/Qualcomm/Nokia and others; and attempts to establish patent pools failed to gain enough support to thrive. At the start of 5G,…
Ericsson returned to profit in its fourth quarter of 2019 despite a drop in sales in its biggest market, North America, which it blamed on uncertainties surrounding the proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, and the impact of that outcome on 5G. The US market is waiting to see whether the third and fourth MNOs will be allowed to merge, a move that has been approved by regulators but could be blocked by legal action from several states on the grounds of reduced competition. The operators argue that, if they can combine their operations, they will have the scale to build out 5G more quickly and comprehensively, by combining Sprint’s midband 2.5 GHz spectrum with T-Mobile’s 600 MHz coverage band.…
In emerging markets such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, national wholesale networks are sometimes seen as a way to accelerate roll-out of modern connectivity and to help the country leapfrog its more mature counterparts. Sometimes these networks have been mandated by the regulator, as happened with 4G in Kenya and South Africa, but conflicts of interest meant that those failed to achieve their goals. A commercial, fully neutral host network can be easier for MNOs to accept, since they can save costs without the complexity and competitive sensitivities of a joint venture arrangement. In South Africa, wholesale fiber provider Liquid Telecom plans to add a 5G wireless network to its services in all the country’s major cities. Since Liquid is…
In recent years, the UK fibre market has become very crowded, as start-ups have taken advantage of the government’s desire to increase competition to BT’s wholesale arm, Openreach, and to accelerate the UK’s slow pace of roll-out of fibre to the home or premises. Consolidation between the smaller players looms, and the changes in market structure will not just affect home broadband services, but the availability of backhaul for MNOs and for others deploying dense cellular or WiFi 6 networks, especially in outdoor environments such as smart cities. The first in what is likely to be a wave of transactions sees the most prominent of the new players, CityFibre, buying FibreNation, a unit of Internet service provider (ISP) TalkTalk. The…
Orange Europe believes it can save €1bn in network capex and opex over 10 years through increased RAN sharing, and has warned regulators not to block such deals, or jeopardize the speed of 5G roll-out. However, the French-based operator is more cautious than some of its competitors about offloading, rather than just sharing, assets. As companies like Vodafone and Telecom Italia look to carve out their tower operations and potentially sell large stakes in them, Orange warns that this could be only a short term gain. Ramon Fernandez, CEO for finance and performance in Orange Europe, told investors that, following active RAN sharing deals in Spain with Vodafone, and Belgium with Proximus, “more announcements could follow”. Orange already shares significant…
The UK’s CityFibre has agreed to acquire FibreNation, the infrastructure unit of Internet service provider TalkTalk (see below), a deal which will make it less reliant on its partnership with Vodafone, and give it greater scale with which to challenge incumbent BT Openreach and help shake up the backhaul, as well as the access, market. The deal also highlights several broader trends which are becoming visible in western European markets and elsewhere, which will help shape the 5G and converged fixed/wireless services landscape with a far greater role for asset sharing and wholesale models. One is the beginning of a trend to separate service provision from infrastructure. Sometimes this may be mandated by the government – in the UK, regulator…
There are three main steps to properly creating the Internet of Things; a problem that businesses seem to still collectively struggle understanding. This is the first of three articles in which we lay out this process, covering the first step – actually connecting a given thing to a network. The next two steps are using these connections for internal business applications, and then the process of interconnecting all of these applications for external use. Our definition of the IoT has remained pretty consistent through the years – ‘connecting a previously unconnected thing to the internet, and then deriving value from this new connection.’ However, in the time we have been writing about the market, it has greatly fallen short of…
The launch of the Connected Home over IP (CHIP) working group, housed inside the Zigbee Alliance, caught us off guard. Formed by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Zigbee, the group wants to create an interoperability standard for smart home devices. However, it appears that the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) was also caught unawares, which is surprising, given that it has been plugging away at just such a standard for the past few years. We spoke to the OCF’s President, David McCall, also a Senior Director at Intel, looking to get a more detailed view of the events leading up to the CHIP announcement. We put it to McCall that, from the outside, it looked like the OCF had been quite quiet…
The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) specifications from standards body ETSI once led the way in defining a telco-led vision of the edge network architecture. As many non-telco players have piled onto the edge bandwagon, MEC’s influence has waned somewhat, in favor of platforms that support a greater diversity of service providers, edge locations and enterprise applications. However, it still has considerable support among operators, and as such will retain a role in the broader edge platform, even if it now mainly provides APIs (application programming interfaces) that work with other frameworks like OpenFog, rather than the entire architecture. ETSI has announced its latest brace of MEC reports, which focus on two topics of great interest to forward-looking 5G planners –…
Ateme has won a grant of an unspecified sum for its work on applying artificial intelligence to video delivery. The French firm’s research included bitrate reduction through core encoding improvements, higher video quality using Content Adaptive Encoding, and optimizing media supply chains and cloud storage via elastic encoding orchestration. As part of the i-Nov Innovation Contest, the IA4SEC project is funded by the French government. CDN provider Limelight Networks has for no apparent reason called Quibi a “brilliant idea” despite the short-form content platform committing to using Google’s CDN infrastructure for when it launches in April. Amazon Music has surpassed 55 million total users, without breaking out the balance of paid subscribers and those using the free, ad-supported tier.…
Nagra has waved in the opening weeks of 2020 with a couple of new additions to its Android TV Fast Track program, both hailing from South East Asia and each having significant footprints and connections in the set top supplier chain. Taiwanese fabless silicon specialist Realtek Semiconductor is joined by Chinese electronics maker Shenzhen Jiuzhou Electric in Nagra’s newest frontier. Initially, Faultline’s instinct said this is clearly about Nagra retaliating to recent rollouts of Android TV operator tier platforms from the Netflix-led Hybrid Hailstorm project, by seeking partners in APAC markets to undercut rivals. However, Nagra quickly extinguished these blasphemous notions – assuring us that there is no overlap between the Nagra Fast Track program and Hailstorm. In fact, Nagra…
Although the company started with a focus on ad insertion, it seems Amagi has found solid success with cloud-based playout – going against the grain somewhat considering how playout systems have become basically bereft of value. Since launching in late 2017, Amagi’s Cloudport service has received a steady stream of new customers, as channel operators recognize the efficiencies of cloud management. Announced this week, Amagi has bagged Insight TV’s three recently launched OTT channels – Insight TV Lifestyle, InWonder, and InTrouble – which will now be managed through Cloudport, the AWS-based platform. These Insight TV channels are not necessarily mainstream, but that doesn’t matter – this is the medium-sized, but regular, deal that Amagi has built itself on. Amagi’s…
Peacock flaunted more tailfeathers this week as the NBCUniversal streaming service prepares to launch around NAB time in April. Fittingly, in the firing line this time was the US live linear TV market, as NBCU’s Linda Yaccarino, chair of advertising and client partnerships, promised that Peacock would not be a vehicle for “ad nausea” which has plagued pay TV. What was once a taboo topic, getting people to pay for ads in the streaming sphere is becoming a common theme. Quibi, for all its financial backing, has come under scrutiny for adopting a business model that assumes people will pay a subscription fee for an ad-supported service simply based on the quality of content, despite these titles only being a…
Legacy is shaping the strategy and determining the differentiators for the big streamers as they face up to engage in battle during 2020, with Netflix having the upper hand through being well established in key international markets and profitable to the tune of well over $1 billion a year now. The irony of streaming has been that while it has been seen as the future of video cutting the rug from traditional pay TV in the US at least, it has not been very profitable. It took Netflix a few years to achieve profits at all in line with revenues and it is still having to invest most of what it earns in original content production. But its key emerging…
Haivision, co-founder of the darling low latency video streaming protocol Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) along with streaming specialist Wowza, has decided to infiltrate the in-house broadcast mobile monitoring market. Revealed late last week, Haivision Play Pro is a free mobile video player targeted at developers, streamers and broadcasters – providing the means for viewing and monitoring SRT video streams on mobile devices. Sky News and video engineering firm Cinegy are among the early adopters of Pro Play. Monitoring contribution streams and viewing return feeds in the field is a key attraction for broadcasters using the SRT protocol – whether live streams, or teleprompter feeds directly from the editorial desk, or feeds supporting remote interviews. Boasting end-to-end latency of under half…
Harmonic’s victory lap last week for steamrolling the Vidgo contract was premature, if a little disingenuous. Apology letters are due in the post to Ateme, CenturyLink, Imagine Communications, Tulix, Verimatrix, Veygo and Zayo, for ignoring their involvement in providing numerous technical pillars and adhesive elements in the expansion efforts of the sports-centric OTT video service. In fairness, Harmonic is encoding, transcoding and packaging an estimated 95% of Vidgo’s current channel lineup, therefore probably taking home the largest slice of the revenue pie, yet there are so many more interesting things going on here than Harmonic’s VOS360 technology. Of all the companies involved in Vidgo’s ramping up, the smallest – Tulix Systems – arguably played the most pivotal role and actually…
Denmark’s Vestas said this week that it will have zero waste wind turbines by 2040. By this it means running a value chain that generates no waste materials. This will be achieved by developing a new waste-management strategy, involving a circular economy approach in turbine design, production, service and end-of-life. The strategy will be presented within the next two years. Waste generated from turbine blades alone will be up to around 43 million tonnes cumulative by 2050. The plan is to make blade rotors out of recyclable composite materials in the future, introduced incrementally from 44% recyclable today to 50% percent by 2025, and 55% percent by 2030. Oil company Total will install and operate 20,000 new public charging points…
The Parliamentary arm of the European Union managed to push through the basic approval for backing the European Green Deal this week, which will hopefully release up to €1 trillion of funding, with about 20% of that coming directly from the EU, and the rest from investment partners. It was first mooted in detail in early December and has now, to all intents and purposes, been voted through. MEPs supported the deal from Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Parliament said that it wanted the move to target even higher ambitions for the EU’s 2030 goal of emissions reductions, aiming for 55% reduction by 2030 up 5% from that proposed by the Commission. The EU will now adopt these targets…
Sonos has filed a lawsuit against Google alleging the infringement of its intellectual property in the latter’s smart speakers. The dispute stems from an old alliance, but now Sonos’s former partners Google and Amazon are threatening to push it out of the home audio market. But if a judge sides with Sonos, it could be a turning point for the current consumer smart home duopoly. Sonos is also claiming, according to reports in the New York Times, that Amazon infringes its patents too, but felt unable to take on two giants at once. The company, which has been in the smart speaker game since the mid-2000s, states that it shared intellectual property with Google as part of a development partnership…