Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Roku is ending 2023 red-faced and left ruing the day its executives gloated of dominating one half of the future TV operating system duopoly. This is one prediction Faultline nailed at the beginning of 2023 – that, despite Roku’s reveling, smart TV and connected TV devices were not fated to become a two-pronged fork, a la mobile and PC (not yet anyway). It is fitting then that we close out our final issue of 2023 poised to welcome another new entrant to the TV OS space – with Chinese electronics heavyweight TPV a month away from mounting a challenge to homegrown options including Huawei’s Harmony OS (AOSP-forked) and Zeasn’s Whale OS (Linux-based), which are both targeting emerging markets. As first…
Akamai has a treasure trove of R&D projects plugging away behind tightly-locked doors to catalyze the CDN titan’s transition from a traditional media delivery business, to an edge compute and security business. But still many of the bleeding-edge developments are happening in streaming video, some of which were teased during a recent webinar by Akamai’s Chief Architect, Will Law – covering Common Media Client Data (CMCD), content steering, QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), Akamai Fabric, and more. It was notable that Law prefaced the dictionary-type discussion with NETINT’s Jan Ozer, Senior Director of Marketing, by describing CDN as one-third of Akamai’s business today. This isn’t strictly accurate, if we are being pedantic, although it isn’t far off, with Akamai’s Delivery…
Sixteen years into its streaming foray, Netflix has finally opened its books and unveiled a list of its most watched programs for the first half of 2023, with a promise to make this a biannual exercise. Netflix executives are not releasing this data out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they have finally acquiesced to years of calls for transparency. Starting its streaming venture as an ad-free space, the SVoD giant is now also an advertising business, and thus must make these numbers public to its new customers—the advertisers. As its users become Netflix’s product, flexing the strength of its offering to prospective advertisers has become crucial—particularly when the streamer celebrated the one-year anniversary of its ad tier…
Turkey’s government has imposed new rules regarding the sales of electric vehicles (EVs) within the country, decreeing that companies importing EVs must have at least 140 authorized service stations spread evenly across the country and open a call center for each brand. While not explicitly targeted against Chinese companies, the requirements are widely seen as targeting them due to the recent influx of EVs imported from the country and the European Union’s (EU) exemption from the new rules. Not a single company satisfies the conditions of these rules which come into effect in less than 3 weeks, and so exemption will be the only path forward for companies in the foreseeable future. China exported nearly $180 million of EVs to…
Copper’s future supply balance has been hit with a one-two punch over the last couple of weeks, as First Quantum’s $10 billion Cobre Panama mine has been ordered to cease operations with immediate effect and mining giant Anglo American has announced production cutbacks to the tune of 200,000 tons per year. The surprise removals from future supply total 600,000 tons of copper in a market of around 27 million tons. A surplus of 200,000 tons had previously been expected in 2024, which would grow further in 2025. Now the immediate supply and demand balance is much more fraught. The Cobre Panama mine – projected to output 1% of global mined supply once operational – has been experiencing significant delays due…
Germany operator 1&1 is up and running, with what it claims is Europe’s first Open RAN 5G network, with technology provided by Mavenir and Rakuten. 1&1 has offered FWA since December 2022 and while the mobile network is being built out, customers will use the Telefónica network and from summer 2024 onwards, on the Vodafone network. The Nepalese National Telecommunications Authority (NTA) may block Axiata’s sale of Nepalese unit Ncell because it was not notified of the sale beforehand, according to an NTA chairperson. Malaysian telco conglomerate Axiata said publicly that it would sell its 80% stake in Ncell, the Nepalese mobile service unit last week. In another boost for network APIs, BT has signed up to Nokia’s Network as Code platform.…
The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has published its latest industry report, charting the progress made for WiFi in the past year, and the expected roadmap for the next. Heavily technical, the report explores the convergence between WiFi and the cellular standards, and caps it off with a survey that gauges the mood of the industry. As disclosure, Rethink helped author part of the report, mostly focused on the survey sections and the discussions of convergence and spectrum regulation. The WBA sees WiFi as the most important wireless protocol to consumers. To this end, its discussion of the convergence between WiFi and cellular positions the former as the more important party. This tends to rub MNOs up the wrong way. Still,…
On the same day that the European Commission approved the UK merger of Three and Vodafone, BT announced Multicast Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD), a new back-end network technology that it pitched as transformative. However, the cost savings appear miniscule, and amid a questionable rebranding to EE, the former state-owned incumbent is vulnerable. Orange launched in the UK in 1994, and in 2010, the division was merged with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile – rebranding as EE in 2010. In 2016, it was acquired by BT, with a questionably favorable ruling from the UK competition regulator, the CMA. Now, BT is trying to simplify its BT, EE, and Plusnet brands, and has opted to go with the mobile-centric one. Notably, gaming is at…
The connected car market is poised for another growth spurt, judging from the flurry of recent partnerships and acquisitions between mobile operators or technology firms and automotive technology specialists. Most recently, Japan’s SoftBank paid €473 million ($510 million) for a majority 51% stake in Irish vehicular software specialist Cubic Telecom. That is a lot to spend on an Irish startup founded in 2007, with €110 million in funding and just over 180 staff. But it reflects Cubic’s success in assembling an ecosystem around its platform for enabling global connectivity, with regional variations that can be executed and updated from a central point. It allows the OEMs, in this case automotive makers (automakers), to monitor and manage a growing array of…
All industries are scrambling to catch up with the pace of growth in AI, and the excitement has brought a wave of soul-searching among operators and vendors. Netcracker has scored an AWS partnership to make its recently-launched telco platform available via AWS Bedrock, and so MNOs need to gauge how much enthusiasm to dedicate to GenAI’s pursuit. The predictions are mind boggling. McKinsey’s latest AI report claimed that generative AI (or GenAI) can deliver between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in growth across all businesses. GenAI is a type of AI capable of creating original content or information, including text, images, audio and video. According to the McKinsey report, 40% of respondents say their organizations will increase their investment in…
Ericsson is to be the dominant supplier of AT&T’s ‘open RAN’, on which the US operator plans to spend up to $14 billion over the coming five years. In the old world of traditional RAN, this would have caused only a small stir. Ericsson has been a powerhouse in the US market since it acquired many of bankrupt Canadian vendor Nortel’s assets in 2009, establishing a strong north American base that had previously eluded it. Now, it is the largest RAN vendor for the big three US operators. But the news of its latest success with its long-standing client caused a furor because it concerns Open RAN, or at least AT&T’s definition of that. Open RAN – which enables operators…
The US operators have always faced the challenge that their country’s spectrum band plan is perennially out of sync with the rest of the world, for historical reasons related to allocations for broadcast, satellite and local broadband, as well as a very fragmented geographical system. At the start of 5G, the incumbency of satellite and federal users in 3.5 GHz – the main global band for first-phase 5G roll-out – meant that AT&T and Verizon had no midband spectrum and had to deploy in challenging millimeter wave bands. However, the operators invested heavily last year in the auction of C-band spectrum, and some of that has already been vacated by incumbent satellite users – adding considerably to the 5G capacity…
Wireless Watch does not go in for predictions pieces at the end of the year, but let this serve as a sliver – the next year will see the same mistakes made in the early stages of 6G as we have painfully suffered through with 5G. A new technology is nothing without a business case behind, and operators will struggle to find a problem to solve with their new solution. It might seem natural for momentum to build around an impending new generational technology, as the time approaches. The mobile industry has been doing this since its inception 40 years ago at roughly decadal intervals, yet the process seems increasingly irrelevant as the 5G era unfolds. Progress is now more…
Five years ago this week… French DRM innovator Inside Secure announced plans to fully acquire its larger US-based VC-funded rival Verimatrix. The two presented similar offerings in content protection and DRM, without a significant customer, technology or geographical overlap. Inside Secure mainly applied to apps on handsets, while Verimatrix supplied multi-DRM to some 800 operator customers at the time. Both saw their future in protecting IoT end-points, like connected cars, and a union would accelerate the innovation in those immature sectors. The deal was finalized in February 2019 for some $156 million, and the merged entity took on the Verimatrix branding in July that year. Charter Communications has warned of a potential Q4 broadband subscriber slump, following its earlier guidance…
Seeking to escape Western-centric discussions, European audiences at SportsPro Madrid, the inaugural setting of the rebranded OTT video conference, were granted an introduction to the Indian sports world from Sanjog Gupta, Head of Sports for Disney Star India. Times of turmoil for Disney in India cannot be ignored, although they most definitely were by Gupta. After losing streaming rights to the country’s famed Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket championship, Disney’s local OTT service Disney+ Hotstar hemorrhaged 23.7 million paid subscribers in a year—a 38% drop down to 37.6 million as of Q3 2023. Despite remaining profitable, the linear business has suffered as well. Disney Star reported a year-over-year consolidated net profit drop of 31%, and a 21% YoY decline in…
A new blogpost from Netflix’s developers sheds light on how measuring its HDR streams with the video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF) metric has optimized its encode ladders. This claims to have reduced the company’s storage footprint and data usage, while improving QoE for subscribers across all viewing devices. The arrival of HDR-compatible VMAF (HDR-VMAF) has allowed Netflix to create HDR streams with dynamic optimization (DO) encodes, rather than a fixed ladder, which offers predetermined bitrates regardless of the content being encoded. Netflix says its own internal traffic has moved entirely from 100% fixed-ladder HDR encodes, as of August 2021, to 100% HDR-DO encodes by May 2023 – just under two years. The headline stat is that the optimized ladder takes…
If one thing was certain at last week’s SportsPro Madrid event, it is that virtually every attendee wanted DAZN’s attention. Whether a small gambling video rights holder or giant global vendors, the international sports streaming platform was the name on everyone’s lips. Faultline was unsurprised to find a packed room during DAZN CEO Shay Segev’s on-stage interview, serving as a climax to the three-day conference. Segev is not timid about DAZN’s ambitions, namedropping household brands like Spotify, Netflix, X (Twitter), and Meta (Facebook) – openly declaring desire to transform the global sports brand into a utility. “In five to ten years, everyone will have DAZN,” Shegev projected. He relents it is “still a long journey” and compares the streamer to…
In the ultimate episode of our webinar series, Faultline decided to end the year with a bang, covering one of the most disruptive and disrupted components in the industry – content delivery networks (CDNs). What was intended to be a conversation on fleshing out what will define next-generation CDNs, with a planned sidenote for Open Caching, quickly turned into a discussion dominated by the Open Caching specification developed by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). But first, uniting rivals and opinionated vendor representatives in one panel was bound to cause some friction. Sparks flied between Keith Chow, Senior Product Manager at Nokia, and Xavier Leclercq, VP Business Development at multicast ABR (mABR) advocate Broadpeak. Chow launched the hostilities, regarding the…
We could be waiting until late 2024, possibly even into early 2025, before Avanci Video – the one-stop shop for video codecs launched in late October – announces its first licensee. This is because the royalty rates for the patent pool don’t event exist yet – and won’t until Avanci has worked its mediating magic on the minefield that is getting the 27 current licensors (soon to be more) to agree on the worth of their intellectual property while potentially litigating against one another. Royalty terms are some of the most controversial sticking points in the entire video ecosystem. Negotiations are now taking on a new direction with Avanci Video pursuing a content-based licensing structure to target video streaming services…
EPC contracting for the 2 GW Alar solar complex in Xinjiang this week saw one 200 MW tranche awarded for just $104 per kW. There’s a curiosity to this project which is that it’s explicitly stated to have exactly the same MWac and MWdc size – 1,000 MW for both. It’s also stated that sets of twenty-six 550-Watt modules will be unified on one string, with 22 strings (314.6 kW) connected to a ‘DC combiner box,’ then 10 of those boxes connected to a 3,125 kVA inverter to boost AC power to 35 kV. Normally, solar installations have a lower MWac value (on the inverter), because it’s rare for the solar panels to output their full power, which makes it…