Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Apart from the unique case of China, India has presented the greatest challenge to Netflix in its bid for global dominance in SVoD as major media rivals such as Disney, Amazon, Comcast and AT&T step up their pursuit. It failed to get off the ground at first by refusing to break its global pricing strategy and cut subscription costs to the level not just of streaming rivals but also legacy pay TV. It has since done so by cutting prices in March 2018 to between $3 and $4 a month, as it has also done in Malaysia, but initially even that achieved only a modest spike in growth. After all, even 250 rupees a month, just over $3, is still…
In a week where Abbott Laboratories unveiled the first smartphone compatible implantable heart monitor, we wondered what was likely to become commonplace first – such implantable ‘wearables’ or self-driving cars. Both exist in highly regulated marketplaces, but consumer wellness as and commercial healthcare might have a primary benefit – a lower end-cost to the consumer. Consumer wearables proved that there is strong demand for the ‘quantified self,’ that is, devices that provide users with data about their bodies. Initially, this was step count and sleep tracking, but in time, as the technology improved, this has evolved to heart rate tracking, blood-oxygen levels, and soon even blood-sugar levels. Fertility tracking is also a quickly growing market. While the wearables themselves might…
Gone are the days when satellite was scarcely mentioned with regard to the mobile market, except to provide backhaul or access in very remote areas or to emergency services – or because of disputes over spectrum allocations. Now, some companies are looking to use satellite spectrum for terrestrial 5G (in the USA, Dish and Ligado), while others want to expand the use cases for satellite networks to support a wide range of enterprise and consumer applications, and give the technology a central role in 5G. This week, satellite operator Telesat reported the results of a project with Vodafone and the University of Surrey in the UK, to carry out the world’s first demonstration of 5G backhaul using a low earth…
Nearly three years ago, Tesla shelled-out $2.6bn on SolarCity, then the largest solar player in the country. Some were skeptical of the rationale behind the decision, given that CEO Musk’s cousins were founders of the firm, and had begun experiencing some difficulties in the market. At the time, it made a lot of sense for Tesla to be able to offer some sort of bundled deal that included a car, home battery, and solar panels, as a single contract – but this hasn’t happened, and Tesla lost interest in SolarCity as it struggled to get the Model 3 out the door. Now that it has finally cracked that nut, Tesla might have the energy to focus on what to do…
Gone are the days when satellite was scarcely mentioned with regard to the mobile market, except to provide backhaul or access in very remote areas or to emergency services – or because of disputes over spectrum allocations. Now, some companies are looking to use satellite spectrum for terrestrial 5G (Dish and Ligado in the US), while others want to expand the use cases for satellite networks to support a wide range of enterprise and consumer applications, and give the technology a central role in 5G. This week, satellite operator Telesat reported the results of a project with Vodafone and the University of Surrey in the UK, to carry out the world’s first demonstration of 5G backhaul using a low earth…
Sinclair has reached a deal to acquire 21 regional sports networks (RSNs) from Disney for $10.6 billion, around three months after CNBC claimed the US broadcaster had dropped out of the running. In a case of David versus Goliath, somehow or another Sinclair has managed to beat away bids from Amazon – and its share price is already reaping the benefits. As well as opening doors into the hugely lucrative live sports streaming market, the deal marks a potentially bigger cash cow in the form of live sports gambling, with country-wide legalization across the US hanging in the balance. The wealth of user data Sinclair can leverage through the deal, as well as the technology clout, gives it merit for…
It is not just price and convenience that has propelled OTT and provoked churn from legacy pay TV services in many more mature markets, but also analytics and rate of service evolution. Netflix in particular is often held out as the beacon other operators should follow for innovation, although it is now so big that its investments in areas such as advanced audio for example are beyond the means of all but the largest players. Netflix has however set some worthwhile precedents over software development, in particular DevOps and the associated microservices, which first appeared on the radar for pay TV around six years ago. It is only much more recently that many operators have got around to incorporating DevOps…
An irrecoverable flow of cord cutters wreaked havoc on the US pay TV industry in Q1, with much written about the record figures across cable, satellite and vMVPD services, and it was the same old story of glossing over the bigger picture. The top six US operators recorded video losses of more than 1.2 million between them for the first quarter of 2019, which for the year to date period cumulatively comes to over 3.7 million losses – a total hemorrhaging which AT&T and Dish Network accounted for more than 70%. Indeed, the key differentiator is that both these satellite TV operators run separate vMVPD services, with DirecTV Now and Sling TV, which are bundled into figures along with satellite…
Long before Comcast came sniffing around Sky, it was always worth taking a deeper dive whenever the European pay TV powerhouse made an investment in a technology vendor due to its acute sense of smell for emerging trends. Now under ownership of the US cable giant, every investment must be put under the microscope – with the latest being Canadian UI developer You.i TV. The announcement highlights how Sky’s investment, for an undisclosed sum, comes after You.i TV last month claimed to have cashed in more deals in 2018 than in every other year of operation combined, with international business accounting for 30% of total revenues. We can confidently say though that Sky has had its eager eye on You.i…
One way that the unlicensed low power WANs (U-LPWANs) could extend their base, despite the increasing number of licensed network roll-outs by MNOs, is to create truly open platforms, lowering barriers to entry for device makers and service providers, WiFi-style. LoRa, the most widely deployed of the U-LPWANs, may be trying just that with its main technology developer, Semtech, releasing a first batch of code into the ope source process. This code is the first instalment in the LoRa Basics system and developer program, which has three aims – to ease deployment of LoRa networks; to attract a far wider base of developers and other stakeholders; and to counter the criticism that LoRa remains too dependent on a single chip…
In October 2017, Dell EMC set up an IoT division with a three-year, $1bn program to develop an architecture and services portfolio centered on the edge and 5G, but with little space left for MNOs in its value chain. Halfway through that three-year period, the company has warmed towards some telcos at least, signing a partnership with Orange to work on use cases and a common hardware platform for the edge-based 5G IoT. The partnership involves most of Orange’s units – its mobile or fixed operations in Europe and Africa, and Orange Business Services in 196 territories around the world. Initially, the two companies will cooperate on defining promising use cases and business models; and validating hardware accelerators to support…
We have often written about the opportunity for various industries to make far more transformative use of mobile connectivity, if they are given greater control over how the networks are optimized. This is not just about 5G, although it is critical to 5G that there is dramatically more industrial use of the new networks. This is true for the traditional operators, which need their investments in infrastructure to support a far wider range of revenue streams than more video and virtual reality traffic generated by budget-sensitive consumers. It is certainly true for many governments, which have placed 5G at the heart of industrial and digital plans and are expecting the new networks to improve economic competitiveness and social inclusion. And…
The breaking of bread between Amazon and Google late last week represents much more than belatedly putting to bed a long-standing spat. With Alexa now supporting YouTube across additional Amazon hardware, and Google Assistant embracing Prime Video on Google streaming devices, the move encourages cross-collaboration across the voice technology ecosystem – nourishing the soil for vendors and services to flourish. Specifically, in the coming months, the YouTube app will launch on Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, while Prime Video will arrive across Android TV device partners – finally receiving Chromecast compatibility. Later this year, the YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps will land on Fire TV. Our opening sentiment is perhaps most relevant for Android…
Microsoft has acquired 23-year old Express Logic, which provides real time operating systems (RTOS) for IoT and edge devices running on microcontrollers (MCUs). This is another move that sees the firm belatedly accepting that the new world of IoT, edge and 5G means it has to abandon the idea that Windows is suited to everything. Under previous CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft wasted a lot of effort squeezing Windows into applications for which it was ill-suited, particularly in the embedded and low power markets. Windows Mobile, Embedded, Auto and others were always outshone by Linux-based options, while the single-OS strategy always kept the software giant out of the MCU world. That was of little account when RTOS ran on specialized, relatively…
Intel gave up, some time ago, arguing that general purpose Xeon processors, however powerful, would be sufficient to support all the complex and demanding workloads of a virtualized 5G RAN. That market will be driven by custom logic, and the company is assembling a broad portfolio of options to surround Xeon. It can now offer FPGA (field programmable gate array), structure ASIC and full custom ASIC, with the 5G vRAN one of its top three targets. It has made several acquisitions to support the strategy, including FPGA major Altera, structured ASIC provider eASIC, and now, a second FPGA company, Omnitek. These options will support different use cases and workloads, allowing demand tasks like artificial intelligence or virtualized RAN to be…
The US-orchestrated attempt to bar Huawei and ZTE from allies’ 5G networks on grounds of national security risk has not gone smoothly. Only Australia and, to a more limited extent, Japan have imposed bans so far, though several other governments, including those of the biggest European states, are debating the issue. But the saga is certainly having an impact, though not yet on Huawei’s financial performance (see separate item). Across Europe, it is likely to lead to reviews of current security practice and stiffer new codes of conduct, designed to improve protections against spyware, wherever it might come from, without resorting to bans which are deeply unpopular with operators and could increase the time and cost to deploy 5G. In…
After quarters of doom and gloom among Qualcomm investors, about the financial cost and even existential risk created by the war with Apple, the tables are completely turned. The two companies have settled, with Qualcomm clearly coming out best; the chip provider has its iPhone contract back and has seen yet another challenger to its modem crown, Intel, driven off. Meanwhile, Apple has turned in its worst iPhone quarter, with a 17% drop in the revenues from its core product. The decline is far worse than the 4% fall that the entire smartphone market experienced last year, and Apple has already been overtaken as the number two handset vendor by Huawei. Not that these smartphone trends are good for Qualcomm…
The biggest question facing operators as they devise their strategies for edge computing is whether the cloud giants will be competitors or partners. In the centralize cloud, the scale of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure is hard to beat, but as the cloud is distributed to ever-more dispersed locations, the distributed nature of a telco’s network and sites mean it has more to bring to the table. An operator might partner with AWS or Azure, providing locations and high quality connectivity while the cloud company brings its services and brand. As services become more personalized and differentiated, the operator might increase its place in the value chain by supporting network slicing from data center to edge. Those slices might call…
To achieve 5G success, operators must stop talking about the network For several years now, the new use cases for the 5G network have been discussed and hyped. Low latency, high availability connectivity, combined with artificial intelligence, network slicing, and a host of other buzz technologies, will deliver an entirely new business case for operators and enable transformation for industries. Yet, with 5G in its early commercial stages, we see a rising number of flagship events that tick all the boxes in terms of next generation enterprise applications – autonomous vehicles and robots enabled by low latency connections, edge computing, AI analytics and so on. Yet they rarely mention 5G. Last month, two hi-tech manufacturing initiatives were launched – the…
The third wave of the 3GPP Release 15 standards – the so-called ‘late drop’ – has been released, several months later than originally expected. They were ratified at a recent meeting of the 3GPP RAN group in Shenzhen, China. This was not accompanied by much fanfare – it mainly consists of highly detailed technical specs, many concerned with dual connectivity (see separate item). However, the existence of multiple waves of standards, and the delay to the third of these, suggests the 3GPP process is struggling to adapt to the extreme complexity of modern networks. The first set of Release 15 specs defined the Non-Standalone radio network, a subset of the full standard which was fast-tracked, under pressure from operators led…