Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The year has barely begun but the e-sports industry is staking a claim as a serious trend to watch throughout 2018, with several companies already attracting acquisitions by major media players in January. Pay TV security specialist Irdeto is the latest to enter the space, buying Austrian gaming security firm Denuvo for an undisclosed fee. Irdeto joins one of its customers, Russian mobile operator MTS, which acquired Gambit ESports last week, and more recently Mail.ru, buying ESforce for an estimated $100 million. Interestingly, Irdeto has highlighted Russia as a region notorious for piracy where the company is focused on winning deployments, suggesting the purchase of Denuvo has been made with the Russian market in mind. This would create a rather…
Comcast Cable pledged the future of its business to Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week, which was followed swiftly by US security expert Verimatrix announcing an API integration with the Media Services wing of AWS. Although not publicized, Comcast’s allegiance to AWS suggests less reliance on its in-house cloud infrastructure, and similarly, the latest update from Verimatrix may convince Comcast to add the MultiRights OTT multi-DRM product to bulk up security currently handled by an in-house DRM system. MultiRights OTT brings set tops, HTML 5 browsers and consumer devices under a single rights management security system, and by integrating with AWS Media Services, Verimatrix can provide pay TV operators, broadcasters and pure play OTT video providers with a cloud-based product…
Eight of the video industry’s most powerful and influential companies have put rivalries aside in the name of bringing down content pirates. The emergence of another combined, industry-wide effort is positive news in the battle against piracy, yet the OTT ecosystem is still crying out for an effort to promote a cross-industry collaboration – one extra step that could make all the difference. Amazon, Netflix, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, Paramount and Warner Brothers have filed a joint complaint against Dragon Media, a supplier of set tops installed with the infamous Kodi software. The Dragon Box set top uses software to link users to infringing content on the internet, including movies, TV shows and live sports, at…
Qualcomm’s fine from the European Commission announced this week could be the bullet in the head of the current administration at the company. It’s one thing to be beaten up by Apple which doesn’t want to pay its IPR dues and another for Broadcom to be pushing a heavy-handed foot in the door for an unwanted merger, but this move is entirely self-inflicted. Intel, charged with much the same thing in the past by the Commission, was the stand out precedent which said loud and clear, that once dominant, you cannot offer discounts to retain a major client, on an exclusive basis. Qualcomm was undeniably dominant in Europe in baseband radios for smartphones during the past 5 years. Intel ended…
The Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month did not turn out to be the stage for a battle to the death between Amazon, Google, and Apple in the smart home. There was a plethora of product announcements in this area, each a little victory for one of the big three consumer brands, but no one dealt a knock-out blow. And working in the background, cable TV giant Comcast prepared an opening salvo in its fight to sew up the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) market. Comcast has been developing its Xfinity Home platform for a few years now, and has just opened the doors for third-party integrations – setting the stage for a licensing business that could go global,…
The future of video codecs is as uncertain as ever with little consensus emerging among vendors or service providers over which ones will prevail, at least on the distribution side. The situation has not been helped by MPEG’s own decision to proceed with a successor to HEVC even while that codec is still beset by wrangling over licensing and intellectual property. This is tantamount to an admission that HEVC’s performance improvement over its H.264 predecessor has been underwhelming in the face of unprecedented demand for encoding efficiency driven by the advent of ultra HD and proliferation of OTT services. This proposed HEVC successor called JEM (Joint Exploration Mode) arose from an evaluation team set up jointly by MPEG and the…
BlackBerry has launched a new automotive security testing software offering called Jarvis, a cloud-based tool for scanning vehicle software. BlackBerry will be hoping that Jarvis can become an automotive industry standard, as its QNX automotive revenue growth continues to flatline, despite wide adoption. The pressure will now be on QNX competitors, Linux-based Yocto and Windows Embedded Automotive, to come up with their own security scanners, as an additional feature to their software offering. Jarvis scans code to identify security vulnerabilities in a car’s software. One of the key issues faced by automakers on software security is that much of the binary code that different pieces of hardware might be using is developed by a number of third party suppliers. Just…
Sprint has always been the closest of the US mobile operators to the cable sector and now it has added Cox to its list of partners, joining a recent deal with Altice. This is the latest chapter in a long saga of partnerships, which have never – so far – delivered as much as they promised to do. There is clear strategic logic to a tie-up between mobile-only Sprint and the wireline cablecos to form a fixed/mobile platform to challenge the big telcos’ quad play offerings. A decade ago, Sprint had various deals – with varying levels of success – with the main cablecos, including co-investments in WiMAX, the failed Pivot fixed/mobile venture, and the SpectrumCo arrangement to bid in…
Qualcomm is fighting tough battles on multiple fronts these days – with antitrust regulators, with a hostile bid from Broadcom, with NXP shareholders who are resisting its own bid for NXP, and of course with competitors, old and new, in its core mobile system-on-chip market. With all those challenges, the company still managed to produce some upbeat outlooks for 2018 – but must have thought that the last thing it needed was a credible new challenge in its most successful market, the smartphone modem. That is what it now faces, however. Samsung Electronics has been improving its modem and SoC offerings with its Exynos family, and while this has a small share of the space compared to the dominant Qualcomm,…
The telecoms network is becoming increasingly open. That means the big players, who once would have relied on patents and standards bodies to ensure they had power in new platforms, are now seeking that influence by initiating and controlling open source initiatives. The year has begun with a long list of open source projects engaging in public relations activity to drum up new members and try to establish themselves as the dominant initiative in a particular area of strategic interest for 5G. AT&T has been particularly adept at pushing open source processes into the heavily defended fortresses of the mobile network vendors. It has contributed the foundations for three significant open platforms and is now busily building support, even among…
The closer we get to commercial 5G roll-outs, the more unclear the business case looks, for the majority of mobile operators. To some extent that is natural – it is easy to make bold projections when a new generation of technology is years away, but now the first standards are finalized, and a few operators have firm dates to start commercial activities. But for the rest, they are more likely to agree with BT CEO Gavin Patterson, who said in November that “the business case for 5G still needs to be built … I’ve been speaking to CEOs around the world, and we’ve all been struggling to make the business case work”. There are three aspects to that potential 5G…
BlackBerry has launched a new automotive security testing software called Jarvis, a cloud-based tool for scanning vehicle software. BlackBerry will be hoping that Jarvis can become an automotive industry standard, as its QNX automotive revenue growth continues to flatline, despite wide adoption. The pressure will now be on QNX competitors, Linux-based Yocto and Windows Embedded Automotive, to come up with their own security scanners, as an additional feature to their software offering. Jarvis scans code to identify security vulnerabilities in a car’s software. One of the key issues faced by automakers on software security is that much of the binary code that different pieces of hardware might be using is developed by a number of third-party suppliers. Just one piece…
Radware’s latest Global Application and Network Security Report calls for a rethink on IoT security attitudes, as well as painting a pretty bleak picture. DDoS attacks grew 10% in the year, reaching nearly 40% of businesses, and one-in-six reported being hit by an IoT botnet – meaning that companies shipping devices that can be hijacked are contributing to the problem in a big way. In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre bugs, as well as the ongoing threat of attacks from Mirai and WannaCry, security should be at the top of enterprise priority lists – as the cost of an outage can be crippling, and the damage to a reputation permanent. Security providers, such as Radware, should be…
CES 2018 was not the stage for a battle to the death between Amazon, Google, and Apple. It was home to a plethora of product announcements, each a little victory for the big-three consumer brands, but no one dealt a knockout blow. But working in the background, cable TV giant Comcast prepared an opening salvo in its fight to sew up the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) market. Comcast has been developing its Xfinity Home platform for a few years now, and has just opened the doors for third-party integrations – setting the stage for a licensing business that could go global, if it pulls the trigger. There’s an inherent tension between the new BYOD approach and the existing…
Amazon has taken a significant step to offering a viable cord cutting alternative by adding live premium channel search functionality to Fire TV devices, as well as a dedicated On Now EPG for Prime subscribers. The new features are available for channels including HBO, Cinemax, Starz and Showtime. Roku has launched Ad Insights, an ad measurement toolkit for linear TV and OTT video. More metrics have been added for tracking campaigns – providing insights and feedback for marketers, content owners and TV networks. South East Asian OTT service YuppTV is supplying its white-label video platform to Indian spirituality network Aastha TV, powering its first foray into OTT content via desktop, mobile and connected TVs. On-demand programs from the previous nine…
Analytics technologies are cropping up as an inherent component of more and more business verticals across the video ecosystem, from content security to the network itself, so naturally the encoding players are expanding in this area too. Analytics and encoding/transcoding are two areas that will define the future of video, and such is their importance that service providers themselves are mounting a challenge to vendors with in-house R&D teams. A company relatively new to the game is US encoding start-up Bitmovin, founded in 2013, which picked up a big deal at sports streaming service fuboTV just before the new year, and the company explained to Faultline Online Reporter how its business has rapidly evolved from software encoding to advanced analytics…
The Marlin interoperable DRM has been in almost perpetual limbo since its foundation in 2005, but has just refused to die and now there are signs that it may even come back to life in the era of OTT, hybrid services and UHD. At around the same time Coral emerged as an alternative approach facilitating interoperability between existing DRMs rather than proposing a new universal one, but that did die in December 2012 when the umbrella consortium was finally dissolved. That never gained much traction at all despite sharing many of the same backers, including Intertrust itself. Given that Marlin, the organization, was founded by Intertrust, its two owners, Philips and Sony, as well as Panasonic and Samsung, it was…
While the industry half expected India to whip up some legislation to block the country’s two largest satellite TV operators merging to create a pay TV monopoly, it recently came to light that another factor has caused the merger to stall, after Dish TV uncovered some serious financial problems inside the Videocon d2h operation. We feel this is likely to be a minor roadblock on the way to completing a deal, yet it raises two serious questions – how Videocon d2h managed to conceal its debt mountain from Dish TV for so long, and what would be the ramifications if Dish TV made the unlikely decision to scrap the deal altogether or drop the price offered dramatically? In a tumultuous…
The future of video codecs is as uncertain as ever with little consensus emerging among vendors or service providers over which ones will prevail, at least on the distribution side. The situation has not been helped by MPEG’s own decision to proceed with a successor to HEVC even while that codec is still beset by wrangling over licensing and intellectual property. This is tantamount to an admission that HEVC’s performance improvement over its H.264 predecessor has been underwhelming in the face of unprecedented demand for encoding efficiency driven by the advent of ultra HD and proliferation of OTT services. This proposed HEVC successor called JEM (Joint Exploration Mode) arose from an evaluation team set up jointly by MPEG and the…
Apple very quietly slipped its membership application to royalty-free video compression group the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) at the turn of the year. This is simply a practical step. It will no doubt take about five years for all devices to support AV1, for its performance claims to be borne out and for the royalty free element to be guaranteed. That means that for Apple, a company that likes to take control of all its key architectures, it is time to develop some influence in the enemy camp. It is only from inside this camp that Apple can assert its own patents in compression, but being so late into this game, we would suggest that Apple’s claim to own…