Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
It was only a couple of years ago that Bluetooth beacons looked to be the future of the bricks-and-mortar shopping experience. However, enthusiasm has waned and adoption has been slow, leaving retailers looking for alternative technologies to combat their losses to online sales. The National Retail Federation’s convention was the stage for a number of announcements that illustrate the potential of the IoT here. But to quickly recap Bluetooth beacons, a technology pushed by Apple and then seized by a raft of startups, the stumbling block always appeared to be the integration of the beacon experience into the two major smartphone platforms – Android and iOS. The beacons themselves, small Bluetooth-equipped boxes that could beam messages to nearby users, seemed…
The USA has now enacted a law that should make government data much more accessible to the public, and in turn, to the many businesses that are looking for ways to improve their own data portfolios. Whether it’s marketers or manufactures looking to find new customer opportunities, or trading hubs that want to sell data-rich services, the act should grease the wheels for any company looking to harvest a lucrative source of information. Should other countries follow suit, there could be a veritable treasure-trove of data out there that could be used by businesses to improve their IoT positioning. AI and ML tools will prove vital to making sense of these resources, as a means of pulling these data sets…
Qatari TV network beIN Media pulled out all the stops this week in its vehement allegations against the state of Saudi Arabia for condoning the illegal distribution of its channels by pirate imitation network beoutQ. beIN launched a website describing “the industrial scale theft of world sports and entertainment” and claims to have solid evidence that satellite operator Arabsat is the guilty string puller behind the pirate activities. The debacle has been ongoing now for around 18 months. A panel has been set up by the World Trade Organisation to investigate the case of intellectual property theft. Earlier this week, the President of public broadcaster France Televisions declared it was no longer necessary to sell programs to Netflix, following an…
CDN technology vendor Edgeware made an uncharacteristic move at the tail end of last week, when the Swedish firm opened up its check book and snapped up subtitling specialist Cavena Image Products for $0.9 million. While plenty of medium-sized OTT technology supplier outfits like Edgeware have been feeling the effects of industry commoditization, leading to job cuts, write downs, and private equity buy outs, Edgeware has sought to diversify its business. But what does a cache server expert want with a subtitling company? Well, apparently Cavena, also from Sweden, drastically improves QoE for OTT video services with its optical character recognition technology (OCR), which converts subtitles from image formats to text formats. As we said, diversity seems to be the…
RTL-owned advertising technology vendor SpotX has broken down the video advertising market into four umbrella trends for 2019 – hoping to cover all bases to please everyone without really providing a framework for surviving the siege to come (aside from plugging its own products), nor putting its neck on the line with a bold statement of intent. These are: New offerings will come into play for OTT video services; Traditional TV will continue to transform for today’s digital landscape; Shifting consumer expectations of ad experiences and personal data usage will drive innovations in ad transactions and delivery; and finally, Industry-wide transparency efforts and regulation will spur larger investments in data management. In our book, trends are supposed to be concise…
Why is it that music and radio streaming services have been so slow to adopt voice functionality? Music apps offered by Amazon, Apple and Google have proprietary voice-activated digital assistants, which the likes of Spotify and others have integrated support for on smart speakers and other devices, but this week Pandora has – bizarrely – become the industry’s first pure play audio streaming outfit to offer in-app voice control. There are early signs of a resurgence following the $3.5 billion purchase of Pandora by SiriusXM in October. We were the only outlet at the time to suggest the takeover by the Liberty Media-owned firm, if handled correctly, could create a third surprise contender in the music streaming space. This week’s…
CES was full of automotive announcements, just like last year, and while grand claims of self-driving capabilities were diminished, the mapping ecosystem seemed to get a lot more attention from the vendors. Dampened expectations on the arrival schedule for autonomous vehicles is welcome to see, but in the meantime, there’s an awful lot of back-end platform development that needs to be in place, before such cars can be properly unleashed. It will come as no surprise that Here had a busy show, with its biggest news being the launch of the Open Location Platform (OLP) Marketplace. The OLP has been at the core of Here’s strategy for some time, as a platform that collects location data from all manner of…
A little over a year ago, the Zigbee Alliance and fellow IEEE 802.15.4 standards organization The Thread Group, announced a pre-CES demo of Zigbee’s Dotdot application layer being run on top of Thread’s networking stack. Now, the pair have announced the completion of Dotdot specification v1.0, and the new Dotdot over Thread certification program. It’s been both a fast and slow year in the smart home, so maybe now is the time that Dotdot and Thread carve out a slice of the marketplace. Apple joined Thread back in August, at the same time as the Zigbee Alliance was announcing it had passed the 500mn chips sold mark, and that it expected to account for 85% of 802.15.4 chip shipments –…
Last week, we highlighted Technicolor’s Android TV push as an obvious avenue for its set top business following the failure to find a buyer, and this week the company has teamed up with French fellow Viaccess-Orca in a DRM integration deal. Not only does the deal reiterate how, despite its dominance, Google is not insisting everyone use Widevine in operator tier (although it does on retail Android TV set tops), but is another sign of the rapid pace our industry moves – with the ink barely dry on our last issue by the time a sequel arrived. There are plenty of complexities which come with securing Android TV due to the abundance and variety of potential attackers given its far…
Comcast, through its ownership of Sky, has taken a stake in long-term video technology supplier Synamedia. The new NDS company has, in our view, been the best positioned of the newly spun off video technology firms to arrive in 2018 – and this week’s undisclosed investment is likely to cement that position. There was no word on what Sky specifically wants from the deal or if Synamedia will be offering its services to the operator, but we know the technology for the Sky Go system is a traditional video operation built up by NDS prior to its acquisition by Cisco, and it also built Sky Adsmart which has gone on to be a great success. What’s interesting is the original…
It transpires there was much more to SK Telecom’s investment in local OTT service Pooq last week, as the Korean mobile giant followed up the initial news with plans to merge its own streaming service, Oksusu, with the broadcaster-run Pooq. Even one of the most technologically advanced operators on the planet isn’t immune to the Netflix effect and has been forced to take drastic measures. The announcement has openly admitted that the project’s entire essence boils down to combatting Netflix, with its extensive investments in local programming now irking the country’s largest players to the point of consolidation. But the bigger news is that a merged and soon to be rebranded Oksusu-Pooq is due to launch overseas later this year.…
It might seem a strange time to be entering the TV Everywhere authentication field which has been a can of worms for years but Verimatrix has done so – hoping to entice content providers with new tools in cross-platform analytics especially. The saga of single sign on through pay TV operators’ multiscreen platforms has been going on almost a decade and the essential problem has hardly changed. It is to give subscribers access to all apps to which they are entitled through a single sign-on (SSO) process without having to continually re-enter passwords or undergo other authentication processes. Ideally, users should not have to enter credentials at all if they are coming from personal devices such as smartphones or tablets…
The decision by Canadian connected car cloud platform start-up Mojio to join the Internet of Things Consortium (IoTC) has been trumpeted loudly by both parties over the recent holiday period, perhaps hoping to make a splash ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show. The IoTC has struggled to make itself heard against the clamor from IoT standards bodies and industry associations and has so far failed to gain the thought leadership position it hoped when founded in 2015. It has however gained more prominence with the continuing rise of the connected car and signing up Mojio, as one of Canada’s fastest growing start-ups, has somewhat boosted its profile. The IoTC was set up as a forum for knowledge sharing and establishment…
One of the great hopes for 5G is that it will usher in a wider, more open ecosystem of chip and base station makers, which will boost innovation and competition, and lower the cost of 5G deployment. The hopes rest on the extensive work being done on open interfaces and frameworks for next generation base stations, especially virtualized ones; and on the presumption that 5G will, over time, become very dense. That means it will rely far more heavily than 4G on small cells, a nascent sector in which there are lower barriers to entry – in terms of cost or powerful incumbents – for new entrants. Independent small cell vendors like Parallel Wireless are already highly active in open…
The two biggest announcements concerning Apple, around the turn of the year, were a shock profits warning, and a TV alliance with Samsung. The two are not unrelated. As Apple comes under pressure because of trade wars with China, market slowdown and over-reliance on one product, so it will have to become less rigid about keeping its walled garden intact. Hence at least a glimpse of a more open Apple ecosystem, as provided by the Samsung announcement at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Samsung may operate in more open ecosystems than Apple, but it has its own challenges – defending its leadership of the smartphone market, especially against Huawei, and now weakness in some of the…
As the various LPWAN protocols have tussled for market position, the WiFi story has been the quietest, even though the IEEE has defined a standard for this market – 802.11ah – and the collective weight of the WiFi community completely dwarfs that behind any other connectivity option, even NB-IoT. The first arrival of 802.11ah silicon may start to change all that. There are many supporters of the idea that WiFi, and the IEEE 802.11 standards on which it is based, should cover all the connectivity bases from personal area to wide area; from low to high power; from sub-1 GHz to millimeter wave spectrum; and from low to multi-gigabit data rates – and therefore support almost any use case. That…
The US cablecos are becoming poster children for how non-MNOs can use shared spectrum to grab some of the wireless market from cellcos. Comcast offers IoT services based on LoRA, for instance. And the US cable sector’s R&D arm, CableLabs, has been increasingly active in standards work focused on wireless in shared spectrum, whether 3GPP-based or not, and has developed its own LoRA Server. The group recently announced its latest project focused on Industrial IoT, entitled LPWAN Server. The aim is to create open source software to enable an LPWAN server to be deployed at low cost on commodity hardware, and to support a variety of connectivity options. While data could be transmitted from sensors and devices to the server…
Netflix’s VP of networks, Dave Temkin, poured cold water on the wave of edge computing enthusiasm when he said there was “no performance or cost benefit to be gained by a few milliseconds [of reduced latency]”. This would have come as a blow to many organizations which tout content delivery as the core use case for edge computing, especially when deployed by telcos. However, what such comments should really do is push all stakeholders to be more precise, and more realistic, in their claims. Video on demand does not need edge computing, especially when companies like Netflix have done a lot of work to mitigate the effects of latency on their user experience. Live streamed video, or content based on…