Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Wimbledon and Watson, two legends of their respective fields, have teamed up to produce AI-powered tennis content which on paper has all the minerals to cook up a masterpiece. Yet the collaboration feels like it has fallen well short of what the pair of households names should be capable of, which we feel reflects how the market has reached something of a dead end with regard to applying AI to revolutionizing TV. For this year’s tournament, simply put, Watson AI is producing highlight reels. Let’s be honest, highlights are nigh impossible to make sexy no matter how many buzzwords you tack onto the reel. Is spinning up highlights really all Watson AI – one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers…
An early flurry of pre-IBC announcements have been teased in the last couple of weeks, none odder than the DVB saying it will demonstrate a new open approach for delivering OTT video. Leaning heavily on multicast ABR, the broadcasting standards body has released its DVB-I specifications supporting low latency video with enhanced service discovery. In a busy week for DVB, the group also announced that TV receivers can now adapt an HDR video signal to the characteristics of the display. Our immediate bone to pick with the organization was whether DVB-I is being positioned as an eventual successor to HbbTV services, which on first glance appears to be the agenda here. It was imperative then to get this clarified and…
Almost three years in the making, Harmonic has finalized the deal of a lifetime – signing up cable behemoth Comcast to license its CableOS platform over four years for at least $175 million in software license fees. First things first though, Comcast has hinted at a network virtualization project which in the future it would license to cable operators in much the same manner as its X1 platform. If the syndication of a virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS) is anything as successful as its X1 licensing business, then the virtualized cable market is in for a shakeup of astronomic proportions. In doing so, Harmonic’s CableOS, which Comcast played a part in the design of, could become not just the…
China has said it will strengthen its climate plan and have it ready by 2020, which will involve a reduced emissions targets, Climate Home News reports. In a joint statement with France and the UN, China also said it would publish a long term de-carbonization strategy. The implication is that China can make stronger pledges than it signed up to before. Offshore wind developer Ørsted said it will help Germany’s EEW build a steel factory for turbine foundations in Paulsboro, New Jersey as part of its efforts to roll out its recent win in the US offshore wind sector when it won a 1.1 GW project known as Ocean Wind. EEW will build monopile foundations. Huston’s Sunnova Energy is expected…
We said last week that the Global Offshore Wind Report from the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) was out, but got a longer version sent to us this week. It says that the offshore wind sector has grown 21% on average every year since 2013, taking its total installed capacity to 23 GW globally. GWEC sees potential for the sector to add between 190 GW and 200 GW by 2030. China is expected to become the largest offshore region globally But upon looking at this graph it seems like this is small beer, and that if any group of countries target zero emissions by 2050, that they should be relying on offshore wind for an awful lot more than this…
We heard a joke the other day about an exhausted father and chief executive who is on the verge of a complete breakdown and goes to the doctor for an assessment. The doctor calls the wife in to have a private word, and tells her that her husband must have complete relaxation, no arguments, no stress, and plenty of comfort food and physical comfort and sex, or he may indeed die. The wife leaves the doctor and gets into the car with her husband, and he says “What did he say?” and she turns to him and says, “I’m very sorry, but the doctor says you’re going to die.” The oil industry is in a similar position. Oil is measure…
D-Wave has announced that D-Wave Hybrid, its open source workflow platform that has been built to create hybrid applications that use both classical computing architectures and new quantum computing designs, is now available to download from GitHub. Unsurprisingly, the ulterior motive is to drive demand for D-Wave’s computer systems, as these quantum processors are going to have to be integrated properly into existing business applications. Solving that headache should make it easier for D-Wave to sell into the enterprise and cloud markets. Making the D-Wave Hybrid workflow open source should help there, but open source does seem to be a pre-requisite for most projects in the AI and ML sector. Just remember, Microsoft now owns GitHub, but here’s the repository,…
IBM and Maersk struggled to get their blockchain-backed shipping project off the ground, having to restructure their joint-venture agreements to assure the rest of the industry that it wasn’t going to be anti-competitive. Well, the move appears to have paid off, and TradeLens has announced that with two new members, Hapag-Lloyd and One, it now represents the carriers of more than half of global ocean container shipping volume. Both Hapag-Lloyd and Ocean Network Express (ONE) have joined, and both will operate one of the blockchain nodes that powers TradeLens, determining the consensus for the shared ledger of transactions. They will be validating these transactions, hosting data, and acting as the network’s Trust Anchors. Both are also taking seats on the…
Exide has announced that it has used AT&T’s FlexWare platform for a global digital transformation project, which is now live in Exide’s battery manufacturing and recycling plants. This is somewhat outside the wheelhouse for most MNOs, but it shows how the largest operators have been bracing for an uncertain future. Digital transformation is a trend that is being driven largely by the cloud computing environment. Prior to the cloud, it was exceedingly difficult to link together all of the disparate systems that an enterprise would be using. This is no longer the case, and to some extent, the cloud can simply be viewed as a translation layer between these distinct processes. However, this ambition to connect the systems was always…
A chorus of fiber network chatter has been emanating out of the Italian market in recent weeks, all involving incumbent MNO TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile). The latest progression in TIM’s drive into superspeed broadband involves a potential merger of its own fiber assets with those of wholesale operator Open Fiber – owned by state-controlled energy colossus Enel and state lender CDP. More pressingly, the fiber integration project is perceived as a precursor to TIM instigating a takeover swoop for Open Fiber, for which the operator’s advisers have reportedly earmarked cash in the region of €2.2 billion to €2.8 billion, according to local news outlet La Repubblica. Enel currently owns a 50% stake in Open Fiber and in turn took a…
The WebRTC protocol has crept into video almost by stealth through its widespread adoption by major messaging platforms including Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger, as well as some aspects of WhatsApp. Its development was spearheaded by Google for release in 2013 to facilitate peer to peer communication between browsers and subsequently apps for messaging and other interactive applications requiring low latency communications, notably Voice over IP and video conferencing. Before that, browsers required dedicated plug-ins to participate in collaborative applications or universal messaging systems. Through WebRTC, browsers effectively have embedded real time communications and can participate in group communication via video, voice and chat with ability to share screens and files. As all the leading browsers have now incorporated it,…
MobiTV’s funding round of $21 million two years ago was interpreted as a closing window of opportunity for the once mobile video pioneer to get its newer Connect product off the ground, which in turn represents the company’s U-turn from serving telco titans with mobile technology to delivering big screen services to tier 2 and 3 cable operators. Yet here we are with another $50 million in funding, led this week by existing investor Oak Investment Partners, which is clearly impressed with MobiTV’s change of direction. It brings MobiTV’s total funding to around $214 million since its founding in 1999 and while we were quick to scoff at the vendor’s deployment win at Citizens Fiber in March last year, a…
Just as Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) seemed to be gaining critical momentum to become the leading protocol for low latency streaming, so another one comes along to sow back some doubt among providers of both live and on demand OTT services. The stated goal of the Video Services Forum promoting its alternative protocol called Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) at first sight only adds to the confusion, being to produce a common low latency standard ensuring interoperability within the wider streaming ecosystem, irrespective of the vendors and technologies represented in the underlying infrastructure. There was a gathering conviction SRT was designed to achieve that, being open source and governed by a fast-expanding alliance of currently around 200 industry members, including…
One of the hopes that operators have for 5G is that it will usher in a new architecture and ecosystem, which will greatly reduce their total cost of ownership. A more open, WiFi-like network, made up of commoditized hardware running mix-and-match virtual network functions (VNFs), selected and deployed as simply as downloading smartphone apps from an app store. That is the vision – and of course, many challenges of technology, standards, trust and vendor hostility stand in the way. But open source software and standards for VNF orchestration are slowly emerging to shift the assumptions about what a cellular network should cost. And in hardware, open source is even reaching the chip level with initiatives like RISC-V starting to infiltrate…
The progress in deploying virtualized networks based on NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) has been slower than hoped for many reasons, not least the technical and cultural challenges of this huge architectural transition. Another key factor has been the misalignment between traditional standards processes and the increasingly influential open source community. Operators are looking for the improved economics of a fully open platform, but there is a wait before they will trust these untried systems with their main commercial networks, and also while they wait for a new generation of solutions based on fully cloud-native principles rather than first generation virtualization. An important step forward has been taken to bring old-style and new communities together in enhancing the NFV platform. This…
Meanwhile, in Austria, Three (Hutchison Drei) says it is the first MNO in the country to launch a ‘true 5G’ network. Deutsche Telekom-owned Magenta Telekom (formerly T-Mobile Austria) recently announced ‘5G-ready’ plans but Hutchison Drei says it has turned on full 5G, initially in the city of Linz, where it has upgraded 20 base stations to 5G, and will extend that to offer full coverage in Linz, and 5G in some other cities, by the end of this year. Hutchison Drei CEO Jan Trionow said: “Other vendors are just ‘5G-ready’ or have upgraded individual transmission masts across Austria. Today we are launching the first true contiguous 5G network that is worthy of the name. While the others only talk about the…
Hutchison’s Three group of operators in Europe and Asia-Pacific has never quite lived up to its disruptive potential. The Hong Kong telecoms company launched the subsidiaries in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and the UK) at the start of the century and of 3G roll-outs. The parent has stuck by its sometimes ailing children and steered them slowly to profit, and they have certainly had a strong impact as challengers in their various markets. But they have remained disadvantaged in terms of spectrum and market share. That may change with 5G. A more open approach by regulators to infrastructure sharing, spectrum allocation and M&A will allow the operators to intensify tactics which they already use to reduce…
The 5G roll-out is as much about fiber as wireless. Nokia executives have often said that 5G is a wireline network as well as a cellular one, and the company has supported that view by abandoning a previous strategy to focus only on mobile broadband, and invest heavily in wireline technologies courtesy of the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent. Ownership of fiber, or affordable access to it, is critical to the 5G business case. One reason why Japanese operators can move rapidly and boast of far lower capex levels than most of their counterparts elsewhere is the fiber situation. Market leader NTT Docomo says it has invested steadily over recent years in upgrading and expanding its fiber – to support enhanced backhaul,…
Ajit Pai, chairman of US regulator the FCC, announced in a blog post that the agency is veering towards opening up underused portions of the 2.5 GHz band for 5G. He has circulated an order to this effect, calling this the “single largest band of continuous spectrum below 3 GHz”. The vote will take place at the next FCC meeting on July 10. Sprint owns over 110 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum in most markets and has demonstrated the ideal balance between capacity and moderate coverage that it provides for high speed mobile broadband. Sprint has used some of its airwaves for 4G and will deploy others for 5G, having successfully driven a bid to makes its particular band a…