Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The Independent Streaming Alliance (ISA) is growing, announcing it has added five new niche ad-supported streaming members to the ten founders that created the group in June 2023. At 17.9 million US TV households at its founding, the new additions have topped up the group’s reach by a measly 2.1 million households, rounding off at a neat 20 million US homes reached by the ISA (note the data says TV homes, not connected TV homes). Equivalent to an 11% increase in homes reached, while growing its membership by 50%, this is a perfect example of the problem with free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) – that even with a supposedly independent group, featuring FAST and AVoD providers not owned by any…
The Low Carbon TV (LoCaT) project set benchmarks in early 2022 with research claiming perhaps unsurprisingly that DTT is a significantly less power-hungry content delivery mechanism than OTT video and IPTV networks. Faultline had expected broadcasters to use this data as a sustainability stick with which to beat IP video competitors and the telcos nibbling at spectrum, yet two years whizzed by with relative silence on LoCaT – until this week when an ambitious UHD roll-out plan was declared by France Télévisions. The 2024 Paris Olympics is the pièce de resistance for the broadcaster’s free-to-air (FTA) UHD plans, but the forthcoming Summer Olympics Games are not where the UHD buck starts, or finishes. France Télévisions has announced that its France…
Even before the show doors had flung open at CES 2024 in Las Vegas last week, sustainability was billed by the mutable Consumer Technology Association (CTA) – the owner and operators of the Consumer Electronics Show – as one of the event’s central themes. Faultline’s skepticism was piqued, so we set out to confirm or debunk whether green-tech was really at the forefront of the world’s largest technology gala – hosted in one of the world’s least sustainable cities. Speaking purely to sustainable products in the sector of media and entertainment technologies, at first glance the answer is a hard fail from CES. However, if you just about squint hard enough, glimmers of innovation were present on this front. Early…
Papercup, an AI-based content dubbing start-up, is dangerously close to outgrowing its start-up status. The UK-born voice synthesis specialist claims to be in talks with most of the major Hollywood studios, while scaling out current offerings and developing new ones means Papercup’s cloud compute costs are swelling to such an extent that consolidation of the big three hyperscalers is imminent – soon to standardize on just one. Era-defining decisions lie ahead for Papercup and the broader AI-based voice market – one lined with controversy and potential litigation. What Papercup offers is text-to-speech capabilities enhanced with third-party large language models (LLMs), which are used to train its proprietary AI of some six years in the making. So, glorified natural language processing,…
Yanmar Power Technology (YPT), a subsidiary of the Yanmar Group in Japan, has commenced the development of a hydrogen-fueled 4-stroke high-speed engine for power generation in coastal vessels. Yanmar Power Technology also aims to develop a pilot ignition engine that utilizes a small amount of biofuel and hydrogen co-combustion and a spark ignition hydrogen-only engine. Onshore verification tests are expected to commence in 2024, with the goal of conducting verification operations by 2026. Yanmar Power Technology, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Japan Engine Corporation formed a consortium in 2021 to jointly develop hydrogen-fueled marine engines for ocean-going and coastal vessels. Siemens Gamesa is set to install and test the “world’s most powerful offshore wind turbine prototype” at the Østerild National Test…
Investigators from the European Commission have reportedly landed in China to inspect automakers BYD, Geely, and SAIC to verify the answers given to them through questionnaires aiming to determine the level of assistance received from the Chinese government. Western automakers within the country are not going to be investigated due to the assumption that it is Chinese EV companies receiving unjust benefits which warp the competitive environment. This is likely to be one of the most important tariff discussions in the electric vehicle industry for some time, as it is key both to the competitiveness of European companies and China’s routes to expansion. Chinese companies have already committed significant amounts of money towards European expansion: CATL and EVE Energy have…
In the present day, Boeing is facing issue after issue related to its latest and greatest machine, the 737 MAX 9. After one plane was grounded in 2019 as a result of two deadly incidents caused by flawed flight control systems, Boeing has again been forced to witness its planes being forbidden from takeoff. This time, the incident was a door falling off during an Alaska Airlines flight that took off from Portland a few weeks ago. Unfastened bolts are the suspected cause, leaving the pressurized air inside the cabin too much for the door to handle. With 171 planes grounded by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), Boeing is facing scrutiny relating to its production and manufacturing quality. On January…
Telco software firm Allot is in a spat with US operator Dish over its product offering. Dish Network has not paid the supplier because Allot failed to meet certain specifications as required in the contract, according to a note from the software firm. Dish contracted Allot for its network intelligence and security-as-a-service solutions in 2021. The issue will add $9 million in credit losses to Allot’s balance sheet, the firm said. BT may use SpaceX’s Starlink LEO constellation for broadband service for remote locations in the UK, such as oil rigs, according to The Telegraph. Starlink already offers direct-to-consumer satellite broadband services in the UK but BT is exploring using Starlink for rural connectivity and backhaul. The China Satellite Network Group will…
Spanish satellite IoT provider Sateliot has completed the latest round of funding, as it prepares to launch four more 5G-IoT satellites into low earth orbit. The latest tranche of funding came from Santander, which contributed €6 million, bringing the total to €13.5 million which Sateliot secured from banks and investors in the last year. The other funding slices are a loan of €2.5 million from Spanish bank Avança, and a €5 million corporate debt issued by Sateliot. “The completion of these three operations demonstrates the confidence that top-tier banks, regional public administrations, and other groups such as venture capital, family offices, or business angels have placed in us,” said Sateliot CEO Jaume Sanpera, in a statement. The satellite firm is poised…
We are in the year of WiFi 7’s coming, as well as 5G Advanced. Talk of convergence is again in the air, but also contention for some emerging advanced use cases where both options will come into the frame. Boingo Wireless is a leading cheerleader for WiFi 7 and has just made waves with its claim to have deployed the world’s first network based on the technology at a significant public venue. This is at the Las Vegas Monorail Station at the city’s Convention Centre, featuring during the recent CES 2024. Boingo made much of WiFi 7’s advances over the preceding WiFi 6 and 6E, which themselves were supposed to deliver the upgrade required to meet increasing competition on some…
An Ericsson-led O-RAN Alliance project, which delivered new fronthaul specs last year, promised to make cloud infrastructure based on standard processors, fully RAN-capable for the first time. Despite that breakthrough, which should reach commercial equipment in late 2024, Ericsson is still arguing that proprietary silicon will always outperform general purpose processors (GPP) in the RAN – reigniting a key debate whose outcome will shape the platforms, and pace of adoption, of Open RAN in the coming years. Ericsson, or different parties within Ericsson, seems to be on both sides of the debate, and it is far from an academic one for the Open RAN industry. Three major barriers have slowed the adoption of virtualized RAN, especially Open RAN. These are…
Deutsche Telekom is the latest major European operator to make a serious commitment to telecom APIs as a way to enhance the 5G business case. The German incumbent has formally opened a dedicated unit to develop an ecosystem and services around its enterprise APIs, in a bid to improve the monetization of 5G, and to contribute to a cross-operator effort to establish open platforms that could enhance their position in the digital services value chain. The logic is strong. Large operators collectively connect and monetize a larger number of digital users in Europe than any hyperscaler or internet network, they should be able to build a powerful base of developers, apps and added-value services, and so increase their share of…
The Vodafone Group has signed a $1.5 billion deal with Microsoft, to overhaul its digital offering with AI-based tools, in a bid to boost its enterprise offering and grow in African markets. Microsoft, in turn, gets a piece of the action, as it will use Vodafone’s fixed and mobile connectivity services – and become an investor in Vodafone’s IoT platform. The 10-year contract will be the landmark bid of Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle to uplift fortunes in the tired telecommunication sector, where the outlook for growth is sluggish. Microsoft is a logical partner, it has become the hottest kid on the block again, with its prominent leadership in AI through its involvement in OpenAI. This week, Microsoft surpassed Apple…
Five years ago this week… CES 2019 was rife with quasi-AI announcements, some more groundbreaking than others. Among those featured Hisense USA’s launch of three TV models powered by its HI-View chipset and alleged AI-based algorithms to improve picture quality based on content, such as bettering motion rate when watching sports. Also at the 2019 show, LG added Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to its ThinQ AI system, to accompany Google Assistant on select TV sets. This marked an emerging trend of hardware makers rushing to encompass multiple voice assistants. There are officially 23 million subscribers to Netflix’s ad-supported streaming tier, a ramping up from the 15 million ad users announced in November 2023. Of these, 75% stream Netflix content for…
Xperi is expectedly among the most aggressive vendors pitching in-vehicle entertainment (IVE) technologies at this CES 2024. The US vendor is joined on the show floor by the usual suspects including Germany’s 3 Screen Solutions (3SS) on the front-end, bringing its 3Ready UX development framework to Las Vegas, while chip behemoth AMD has introduced a couple of new automotive technologies to fuel the processing side of CES’s automotive demonstrations. Front and center – and not without contention – is a new in-car gaming prototype feature addition as part of Xperi’s DTS Autostage platform, targeted at auto manufacturers. DTS Autostage, a system blending linear broadcast with IP-delivered content in connected cars, is preparing to roll-out a suite of games via an…
After months of relative silence since its July 2023 launch, Free Telly is back on Faultline’s radar, announcing it will integrate ChatGPT into its Voice Assistant – a move bound to raise eyebrows given the already starkly present user privacy concerns raised by the free dual-screen concept. As a quick refresher, Free Telly offers a 55-inch 4K HDR display, for free, in exchange for allowing Free Telly to harvest viewing and activity data to sell to advertisers, or else users face a $500 fine etched into the contract small print. Free Telly’s integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is eerily marketed as a way to turn the TV into a “valuable, interactive family member”. The AI-powered voice assistant includes custom avatars and…
For years, gamers have been asking Twitch why video streaming has been restricted to a ceiling of 1080p resolution – and for years Amazon-owned Twitch has not provided any definitive answers. Twitch now has now provided both the answer – excessive transcoding costs – and a solution – offloading server-side transcoding resources from Twitch’s own cloud servers to top streamers with adequate processing power. Frankly, this is a masterstroke from Twitch in executing cost savings while keeping customers happy with new features, while appeasing end users with improved streaming quality. Twitch has also teased a roadmap for experimentation with “new codecs”, including of course AV1, which would mark a belated expansion from the niche segment of elite streamers currently benefiting…
DAS Solar has launched its IPO on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, aiming to raise $352 million to expand its cell and module manufacturing capacity, including14 GW TOPCon cells, with Guojin Securities as its backer. JinkoSolar has licensed its TOPCon patented technology to a top-ten manufacturing giant rival. Jinko plans to end 2024 with over 100 GW of N-type solar module manufacturing capacity, while another giant, JA Solar plans to reach 95 GW module, Tongwei 50 GW, and Canadian Solar 61 GW. For now TOPCon dominates N-type expansions although we expect heterojunction and BC cell types to surpass it eventually. US-based electric vehicle startup Revo Zero has opened pre-orders for its hydrogen-electric SUV named Energy. The 3-row SUV features a range…
Huawei is seeking to restore parity with its peak CNY 891.4 billion ($136.7 billion) revenues achieved in fiscal 2020 before the sanctions imposed by the Trump regime began to bite. This was followed by a crushing 30% slump in 2021 to CNY 634 billion ($88.9 billion) when the company admitted its survival was under threat, before recovering slightly for 2022 to CNY 642 billion ($90 billion). Now Huawei is predicting a 9% rise in revenue to CNY 700 billion ($98.2 billion) for 2023, on the back of recovery across the board, including smartphones as well as 5G equipment. The company is now privately talking of recouping all of its lost ground by either 2025 or 2026, at least partly by…
6G should truly enable the era of ‘ambient’ IoT, but as with the initial wave of LPWAN IoT hype, there are many headaches to resolve on the commercial side of things. We can currently attach sensors and track nearly any physical item, to pull whatever information we would like from it – but the issue is determining how to fund that process. Of course, any discussion of 6G should be viewed skeptically, such is the stage of its development. These discussions, however, do need to take place, and so determining how best to cater for new network conditions is a worthy topic. The 3GPP’s Release 15 finalized the 5G New Radio (NR), and was quickly followed by Release 16, which…