Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… Sky tapped Austria as the testbed for its first fully OTT-delivered pay TV offering, Sky X, trialing a dedicated Sky X streaming device. The offering boasted a full-fat Sky line-up with live channels including its trademark sports content, on-demand series, movies, and a host of popular broadcast channels from the likes of Disney, Discovery and NBCUniversal. Sky also controversially made users pay €7.99 ($8.70) a month extra for a bundle only including free-to-air channels – a move which did not please its ad-supported broadcast partners. Sky first announced its all-IP intentions back in 2017, migrating subscribers from satellite dishes to streaming boxes. Seven years later, that full transition has still not occurred. The M6+ AVoD streaming…
The European Union claims to have found direct evidence of payments from the Chinese Government to Chinese electric vehicle (EV) OEMs, this will have impacted prices on vehicles imported into the bloc and so the EU is mulling the unenviable choice of whether or not to impose retroactive tariffs. It claims to have found evidence including: Direct transfer of funds and potential direct transfers of liabilities and funds Government revenue “foregone or not collected” to benefit OEMs Government supplies of goods or services “for less than adequate remuneration” Imposing tariffs will mean higher prices for consumers, slowing Europe’s EV transition marginally as ticket prices on imported Chinese EVs increase to accommodate punitive tariffs from the EU, we would say up…
M&A, IP, Patents Patent pool Avanci has added Volkswagen to its 5G Connected Vehicles program, which accumulates patents for 5G, 4G, 3G and 2G connectivity. The program has over 60 licensors. Renesas has confirmed that is abandoning its planned $249 million acquisition of Sequans, an IoT module provider, citing an adverse tax ruling from the Japanese authorities. Sequans’ stock price has been significantly dented, on the back of the news. 5G RAN AT&T suffered a network outage last week that lasted several hours and even affected first responders’ communications. The operator said that the outage was likely caused by “an application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack”. Three Denmark…
TXO is a company that no vendors that we spoke to at MWC had heard of, and yet, it is a major supply chain and sustainability provider for MNOs the world over. For MNOs, which are battling capex cycles, and the sunsetting of legacy equipment, there is still plenty of life left in the machines that power those networks – and many MNOs are clamoring for spare parts for mission critical systems. Against the backdrop of sustainability, the opportunity for the likes of TXO is enormous. Never has there been a more advantageous moment for this circular economy pitch, and so it is most encouraging on the environmental front to hear that demand for its services has never been better.…
MWC saw a raft of AI announcements, including the extension of the Global Telco AI Alliance, which seeks to develop LLMs for telcos. Netcracker announced its own AI offering, the GenAI Telco Solution, which builds a secure bridge between sensitive telco data and either third party or proprietary GenAI models. Wireless Watch sat down with Netcracker’s Head of Strategy and Portfolio Marketing Susan White at MWC to analyze the offering. Netcracker was on message with its generative AI offerings at MWC this year. The NEC subsidiary and OSS/BSS software provider was singing the praises of its pre-packaged AI and automation offerings, via the Netcracker Digital Platform and the recently launched GenAI Telco Solution. Netcracker claims that its AI products promise…
At last year’s Mobile World Congress, one of the major themes was the ‘accelerator wars’, as chip providers raced to launch products that would address the biggest challenge for running a virtualized RAN (vRAN) on general-purpose processors (GPP). This is a key goal of the Open RAN community, but GPP has struggled to match the performance of dedicated silicon for processor-intensive tasks in Layer 1 of the RAN, such as beamforming and forward error correction. With AI-hype in full bloom, industry leader Intel is now on the defensive in vRAN against GPU-centric products from AI specialist Nvidia, among others. A year on from MWC23, and that challenge of running a vRAN on GPPs has been largely addressed, even if many…
One of the hot topics of Mobile World Congress was the newly announced agreement between NTT Docomo and AWS, which will see the Japanese operator, always an innovator in terms of network architecture, run many of its 5G cloud-native core and RAN workloads in the AWS cloud. This heightened ongoing discussions about how far the public cloud platforms – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – are fit for purpose for supporting distributed RAN, in particular, and what are the benefits and challenges for operators of adopting this approach, rather than deploying vRAN on their own clouds or those of vendors such as Ericsson. Docomo will use Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (EKS Anywhere), a container management software, to support…
The rise of massive MIMO (mMIMO) has driven innovation in dynamic beamforming for efficient implementation in dense urban networks, where traffic profiles can vary greatly by time of day, as well as seasonal and more randomly varying factors. One benefit of mMIMO when effectively implemented should be to optimize urban 5G networks for varying use behavior and traffic. This could, for example, be done by directing more beams upwards at high rise office buildings when they are more heavily occupied during the day. mMIMO has proved a particular challenge for Open RAN by requiring lower latency communication between Radio Units (RUs) and Centralized Units (CUs). Various Open RAN functional splits have been designed to allow different vendors’ components to interoperate…
With the 5G capex cycle firmly over, a complete lack of 5G monetization, and attention already turning to 6G, the mobile industry is at least aware that it is on a knife edge. We have compared the mobile industry to the late stages of the Roman Empire previously, but at MWC 2024, both operators and vendors admitted that the barbarians would be a welcome relief. The two camps are intractable – enmeshed in a sordid history of technical debt, legacy burdens, and the bloated headcounts needed to handle the weight of all those decisions. Operators are painfully aware of the dissonance between how they represent their ‘network’ in marketing, as a single powerful platform, and the reality of the situation…
Allegations over proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms being falsely green are misleading, according to John Gleeson, Chief Operating Officer of web3 decentralized cloud object storage company Storj. As sustainability concerns rise in the video distribution realm, one black dot lies with the growth of web3 initiatives. The association of web3-related energy-guzzling processing power has proven a barrier to adoption for decentralized and blockchain-based technologies, as corporate ESG concerns slowly become more prominent. Storj operates an enterprise-grade storage and distribution system, compatible with Amazon’s S3 object storage. The Atlanta-based vendor does not build out its own drives but taps unused capacity in existing servers, fragmenting encrypted files into nodes distributed all over the globe. Those renting out empty server space to Storj…
Accedo, the Swedish TV app developer, has arrived at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 boasting a new extended reality (XR)-flavored partnership with Qualcomm. The two companies have debuted a white-label product claiming to power and modify immersive experiences that are built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, thereby making XR ever more accessible to operators. Snapdragon Spaces is a reference platform for XR distributed computing, allowing developers to create immersive experiences for XR devices. Aside from offering traditional TV functionality, the platform offers multi-user, AR streaming experiences via lightweight wireless AR glasses, as well as smart home control capabilities. How will this get operators through the door? Speaking to Faultline this week, a spokesperson from Accedo argued that operators…
Warner Bros Discovery wheezed to 97.7 million direct-to-consumer video subscribers as of Q4 2023, only barely better than the 97.6 million reported at the beginning of last year. Excluding WBD’s acquisition of the Turkish SVoD BluTV in late 2023, from which the company inherited 1.3 million D2C subscribers, the company’s core video offerings – Max, discovery+, HBO Max, and premium sports products – are effectively flat for subscribers in the US market, meaning 2023 must go down as a swing and a miss for WBD. To deter investor angst, CEO David Zaslav and his patchwork quilt of executives waxed lyrical about free cash flow, which increased by 33% to $3.3 billion in Q4 2023, totaling $6.2 billion in free cash…
New Relic, despite being billed as the world’s most widely deployed cross-platform observability platform, was only brought to our attention through a recent product launch with TV app developer Accedo. An immediate red flag is raised when walking through the front door of the San Francisco-based company’s website, brandishing an outlandish 15,000+ customers, which tells us either that New Relic is extremely cheap, or extremely good. It transpires the answer is a bit of both. Chris McCarthy, GM of Media and Entertainment at New Relic, confirms to Faultline that New Relic does indeed have a free tier, serving as an on-ramp to the vendor’s war chest of paid analytics tools. McCarthy is not privy to how many of these 15,000…
The phrase shooting oneself in the foot comes to mind with Vodafone and VMware announcing they are taking on bandwidth-guzzling pre-fetched short video clips to improve network conditions. Despite dubious first appearances, Faultline has been told that the joint offering – launched at Mobile World Congress this week – has not been laughed out of existence, but has received significant interest from key players. The proof of concept is an attempt to improve coverage of mobile networks by getting content providers to opt-in to reducing the “infinite scroll” experiences that underpin social media applications like TikTok and Instagram. This pre-fetching of content is also being framed as a wasteful use of energy. Flaws in the business model from Vodafone and…
Five years ago this week… Ahead of Mobile World Congress 2019, Broadcom landed the industry’s first WiFi 6 smartphone deployment, powering Samsung’s Galaxy S10 with its BCM4375 chip. This announcement came way ahead of the WiFi Alliance’s certification of WiFi 6 for devices using 802.11ax technology, which wasn’t set to arrive for another six months. A test of the Samsung Galaxy 10’s speed recorded 76 Mbps when connected to a WiFi 6 router compared to 6 Mbps when connected to a router running an older version of the standard. Five years later, WiFi 7 has recently been launched with limited hardware support, but is expected by the WiFi Alliance to reach 233 million devices on the market by the end of…
Hats off to Darcy Lorincz, CEO of the virtual automotive experience Motoworlds, who was the only panelist to talk truthfully about the real-life implications that artificial intelligence will have on creative workforces, during a Streaming Media Connect session on AI this week. “We went from 16 developers to 2 developers of content, and we’re doing 10 times the work,” Lorincz enthused, after admitting that the recent wave of generative AI developments opened up an opportunity to retire his second job and return to Motoworlds full-time. In other words, Lorincz is speaking from first-hand experience about generative AI’s disruptive credentials. And with generative AI slashing creative labor times by half or even three quarters, who can blame him? The Motoworlds founder…
As hardware decoding support for VP9 reaches ubiquity, notably on mobile devices, Meta is planning to move the minimum codec requirement from AVC to VP9 during the next year, leaving AVC for only legacy support. Meta’s Technical Program Manager, Hassene Tmar, revealed the roadmap during a panel session at the Streaming Media Connect virtual conference. “We already see AV1 picking up a lot of watch time,” Tmar said, adding that more than 70% of Meta’s watch time on iOS is already on AV1, and growing. AV1 is also poised to enable better video quality in countries with lower bandwidth. iOS devices currently without VP9 hardware support can still decode content in software, Tmar noted, while recent support in Google Chromecast…
Bitmovin is up to its usual antics of teasing patent-pending technologies related to AV1 encoding. The US vendor of video compression and player services has filed two patents for technologies related to AV1 VoD compression. Unfortunately, Bitmovin cannot currently convey the details of these patent applications, but the big claim is that these developments significantly improve turnaround times for per-title and 3-pass encoding. On reading Bitmovin’s latest blogpost, Faultline was struck by a sense of déjà vu. Almost two years ago, in April 2022, Bitmovin spoke about applying for a patent to protect a novel approach to AV1 3-pass encoding technology. It is unclear from the latest post whether Bitmovin is teasing an entirely new patent-pending technology or if the…
We all expected to get to this point, but not so soon. Within days of launching, the demo clips created by OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora had already covered our news feeds, along with a thick blanket of commentators amazed and frightened in equal measure by the potential long-term ramifications of this technology. While there has been much speculation about where generative AI can lead the video industry, the only active use cases have been in the customer-facing realm. Personalization and recommendations algorithms have been fueled by similar AI-based technologies for years, while chatbots and diagnostic algorithms have driven reductions in customer service costs. The arrival of Sora, however, has dramatically shifted perspectives on how the content industry, and those who…
CTA Wave – the Web Application Video Ecosystem Project arm of the US Consumer Technology Association – has a new working group hot off the press, tasked with stamping out the prolific piracy trend of CDN leeching. Immediately, the working group’s anti-CDN leeching groundwork – presented by Synamedia executives at Mile High Video (MHV) in Denver – has proven controversial. The project aims to circumvent vulnerabilities in DRM at the CDN level by developing a standardized CDN token format coined Common Access Token (CAT), but there comes a potentially significant caveat to quality of experience (QoE). Complexities in the development of products to thwart the exploitation of CDN tokens, coupled with the scale at which pirates have manipulated DRM weaknesses,…