Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The beginnings of a quiet battle between online video providers and traditional broadcasters for sports rights are appearing. Live sports represents that last stronghold that traditional TV players have over the army of new entrants, but the digital players are beginning to edge in on that territory. The shake-up will be interesting to watch, as digital video providers are using sports assets in a completely different way from how broadcasters have traditionally used them. Amazon is the best example of just how different motivations are between the incumbents and the new entrants: Amazon paid some $50 million for non-exclusive rights to stream 11 Thursday night football (TNF) games this season. While that $50 million is 10 times what Twitter paid…
Roku swiftly followed up its successful IPO, going public at $14 a share with a valuation of $2 billion as of writing, with the launch of a new line of streaming devices and a revamped operating system, looking to further extend its lead ahead of Apple, Amazon and Google in the hardware streaming sector. However, the hardware side of Roku’s business is shrinking, and this seems to have played on the minds of investors because stocks tumbled 27% in the week after the IPO – but this is more of a natural realignment of the inflated stock, rather than major cause for concern. Right on trend, Roku’s new OS 8 talks up enhanced voice commands for users to launch streaming…
The voice control space is in a state of frenzy, but once again Amazon has made the next move, while its competitors are still at the drawing board. If the company could have moved this nimbly in the smartphone space, the Fire Phone might have been a big hit, but that shows the difference of setting the rules in a new sector, and trying to muscle into an established one. Amazon has broadened its line of Echo smart speakers with the unveiling of the new-look Echo Spot and the more heavy-duty Echo Plus. The latest expansion comes in the same week that Google waged war on Amazon, pulling YouTube compatibility from Amazon’s Echo Show speaker, which could be interpreted as…
Telco AI (artificial intelligence) is gaining ground as a technique for operators to improve optimization of their networks, improve understanding of their customers, and take steps towards full automation. ZTE has been a particularly strong advocate, and last week it presented its latest developments to a seminar on network intelligence, held by the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance in Beijing. The SDNFVIA was founded in 2015 by CAICT (China Academy of Information and Communications Technology) to promote innovative SDN and NFV commercial deployments. One of its key concerns, of course, has been the issue of management and orchestration (MANO) in virtualized networks, a vital area, but one split between rival approaches such as that of ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) and ETSI’s…
Last week we analysed the memorandum of understanding announced between the two most prominent industry groups driving edge computing, ETSI’s MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) and the Cisco-inspired OpenFog Alliance. This offered reasons to hope that this important area of technology for mobile operators would be on the road to greater unity. Like ETSI’s other major initiative, NFV, fragmentation has been threatening to derail MEC, but even now that it is working more closely with OpenFog, there are many other groups and approaches vying for attention. This is threatening confusion, frustration and delays among operators, many of whom are unconvinced of the business case for MEC, and daunted by the costs it will entail. That debate, in turn, is threatening to…
Network functions virtualization (NFV) has reached a fork in the road. It is widely accepted by operators as the way forward for their future networks (two-thirds of mobile operators expect to deploy it somewhere in their systems by 2020, according to Rethink Technology Research’s most recent survey of 76 MNOs), But those timelines could be pushed back significantly if it falls victim to fragmentation, as is looking highly likely at various places in the stack, from management and orchestration (MANO) to NFV infrastructure (NFVi). As with any situation where a promising technology threatens to fail through incompatibility, there is a chance for an organization to have significant market impact if it can provide a common solution to put things back…
Have you ever played pass the parcel as a kid? Owning expensive sports rights, when a variety of sports decide to “go direct” to consumers, is what pass the parcel is like. The broadcaster holding sports rights and having committed to pay $billions over time for them, is left holding the parcel, when the business model unravels. That’s pretty much what Altice US is saying about Disney to its customers, and that ESPN is the parcel. “Disney is desperate to make up for ESPN’s crumbling business so the solution is to force Optimum customers to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more than we are currently paying to continue carrying ESPN, The Disney Channel and ABC.” Sounds about right to…
The UK has lost both its major processor IP providers to foreign buyers in the past year, with Softbank buying ARM and Imagination Technologies announcing its £550 million sale to private equity company Canyon Bridge Capital Partners. The announcement of the second deal came shortly after the launch of the new iPhone X, the first Apple handset sporting an inhouse GPU (graphics processing unit) design instead of one based on Imagination’s IPR. The loss of Apple as a customer was a massive blow to a company which was already facing tougher competition (including from ARM’s own GPU design, Mali) and struggling to diversify its business. It responded with plans to sell its non-core business units, including processor IP firm and…
The on-off merger talks between T-Mobile USA and Sprint are reportedly back on, and sources say a deal could be made by the end of October. As usual, Dish Network is being factored into Wall Street’s speculation about the latest round of telecoms and media consolidation in the US. Last Tuesday, shares in both MNOs leapt on reports by CNBC that their respective parent companies – Deutsche Telekom of Germany and Softbank of Japan – were in “active talks”. And according to analysts at Barclays, that could open the door for satellite TV operator Dish to enter the wireless market in earnest at last. The company, which has acquired substantial spectrum assets, has committed to an NB-IoT roll-out, largely to…
Portugal’s NOS has decided to use Dutch firm Metrological’s Application Platform, alongside the WPE open source browser, to launch a new personalized multiscreen service – UMA. The system will sit alongside the NOS RDK set top software provided by Canadian firm Espial, but the two are essentially separate, although not as far as the customer could notice. The announcement came out of Metrological and it wants us to tell you all about the clever stuff it has done to upgrade the User Experience, but first we need to look at the Portuguese market and where it has been heading. There are two major outside influences, what’s happened in neighboring Spain and the arrival of Netflix at the end of 2015.…
Sky Europe may have overtaken Liberty Global at the top of the continent’s pay TV league, but its claim to have also taken over as number one in streaming is clearly misleading at best. It is hard enough to measure overall pay TV market shares accurately when the operators also have customers taking just broadband or mobile services, but counting streaming subs is a real black art. There are so many different variants, such as sVoD, live streaming, TV Everywhere as part of a conventional pay TV package, broadcaster portals like BBC iPlayer, mobile TV services, video sharing sites like YouTube and social media platforms. Some of these are converging, but if we just count total number of hours viewed…
The voice control space is in a state of frenzy, but once again Amazon has made the next move, while its competitors are still at the drawing board – broadening its line of Echo smart speakers with the unveiling of the new-look Echo Spot and the more heavy-duty Echo Plus. The latest expansion effort comes in the same week that Google waged war on Amazon, pulling YouTube compatibility from Amazon’s Echo Show speaker, which could be interpreted as a rather sinister move, considering Google has smart home ambitions of its own. Amazon’s new spherical Spot device comes equipped with a small 2.5-inch screen, front-facing camera, upgraded microphones and a speaker, which Amazon says is best suited for bedside tables or…
The UK has lost both its major processor IP providers to foreign buyers in the past year, with Softbank buying ARM and Imagination Technologies announcing its £550m sale to private equity company Canyon Bridge Capital Partners. The announcement of the second deal came shortly after the launch of the new iPhone X, the first Apple handset sporting an inhouse GPU (graphics processing unit) design instead of one based on Imagination’s IPR. The loss of Apple as a customer was a massive blow to a company which was already facing tougher competition (including from ARM’s own GPU design, Mali) and struggling to diversify its business. It responded with plans to sell its non-core business units, including processor IP firm and ARM…
The on-off merger talks between T-Mobile USA and Sprint are reportedly back on, and sources say a deal could be made by the end of October. As usual, Dish Network is being factored into Wall Street’s speculation about the latest round of telecoms and media consolidation in the US. Last Tuesday, shares in both MNOs leapt on reports by CNBC that their respective parent companies – Deutsche Telekom of Germany and Softbank of Japan – were in “active talks”. And according to analysts at Barclays, that could open the door for satellite TV operator Dish to enter the wireless market in earnest at last. The company, which has acquired substantial spectrum assets, has committed to an NB-IoT roll-out, largely to…
Counter-intuitively, Google has been getting more interested in hardware again. The company whose success has rested on pushing search, advertising and content services to every device on the planet is still fascinated by designing its own products. Now it is boosting its efforts by acquiring part of HTC, mainly for its design engineers and its expertise in virtual reality. Like Amazon, Google has been undeterred by major smartphone setbacks (the disaster of the purchase of Motorola Mobility, now offloaded, bar its valuable patents, to Lenovo). Regardless of conflicts of interest with Android handset partners, and the poor fit of a low margin hardware business within a services and software giant, it has created successive business units around its own gadgets,…
Could Amazon Web Services (AWS), the juggernaut of cloud platforms, become a telco? It has been expanding its role in supporting cloud services for customers in the telecoms and pay-TV world, as highlighted by recent announcements at the IBC (International Broadcasting Conference) event and its alliance with AT&T. Amazon’s experiments with connectivity have been less publicized or wide-ranging than Google’s, and have been assumed, in general, to be geared to a possible connected consumer offering based around Alexa. However, there are other motivations to take more direct control of connectivity, directly or via telco deals. The vulnerability that even mighty AWS has in the enterprise is that customers can use multiple clouds, and move easily between, for instance, AWS and…
Network slicing is a crucial concept in the 5G landscape; indeed, for many operators it will be the best way to justify 5G investment at all. Yet it has remained a vision of vendor labs and international R&D projects, and very little attempt has been made to assess its economic potential. So while BT and Ericsson have a sharp axe to grind in this area, they have at least offered some financial analysis in their new report on the subject, claiming slicing could boost operator revenues by over one-third compared to non-sliced environments. The concept is that a service or individual will be allocated a virtualized slice of network capacity, fully optimized for its particular needs. In a virtualized, software-driven…
The news that the two main bodies setting standards for edge computing – ETSI MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) and the OpenFog Consortium – are working together is more than just another memorandum of understanding between two of the telecoms industry’s innumerable alliances. At least, we have to hope it is more, because warring efforts in this important area of emerging telco architectures could jeopardize the benefits targeted from 5G and the distributed cloud. Operators are faced with several huge technical challenges, which they need to address in parallel over the next few years in order to transform their ailing business model. Migrating to 5G while supporting a decade of 4G coexistence; virtualizing some or all of the network and making…
Make sure to subscribe to get ATW in your inbox, for free, each Monday. // M&A, Strategies, Alliances // Itron is buying Silver Spring Networks for $830m, net of some $118m (!) that Silver Spring had in the bank, adding the Wi-SUN advocate to Itron’s extensive smart grid portfolio. The Trusted IoT Alliance has launched, focused on blockchain-enabled IoT apps – founded by Bosch, BNY Mellon, Cisco, Gemalto, and US Bank, and smaller blockchain companies. Hitachi has combined its Data Systems, Insight Group, and Pentaho divisions into a new subsidiary – called Vantara, which will broadly tackle IoT and IT-OT projects. Comcast has acquired Stringify, the developer that built its xFI service. Stringify provides a rival to the IFTTT automation…