Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
It’s as if everyone at NAB sat down a year ago and decided to introduce their low latency streaming options at this year’s show. We just got through talking about Haivision and Wowzer partnering on lower latency for streaming, and how Akamai has improved its own Media Services Live to do the same, and now Harmonic is talking about how it plans to cut down latency in streaming. At the NAB Show, Harmonic says it will showcase a real-time streaming workflow that matches the latency of live broadcast. Well live broadcast is about 7 seconds or so, so presumably this is about the same. Harmonic says that it is able to do this by simply using CMAF packaging (Content Media…
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced the foundations for his long awaited, long dreaded plans to unravel net neutrality regulations on ISPs – a move that will undoubtedly stifle innovation and harm budding US startup companies in the US. Addressing the net neutrality rules that were put in place by the FCC in 2015 under the Obama administration, Pai said, during a speech in Washington DC, “two years ago, I warned that we were making a serious mistake. It’s basic economics. The more heavily you regulate something, the less of it you’re likely to get.” This statement sounds more like the words of a hungry businessman rather than the words of a man in a position to make genuine forward…
Netflix will be earning some extra revenue from licensing its original content to iQiyi, one of China’s top OTT video services. Netflix, Amazon and others have had trouble with entering the massive market for streaming video in China, but Netflix has found a way in through the back door: by licensing its original content iQiyi, one of China’s top OTT video services. The deal should give Netflix a massive boost in the largest and most difficult video streaming market. Streaming video is booming in China, and there are three large OTT service providers who provide both SVoD and Advertising VoD services, of which the latter are the most popular. The top video streaming service, Youku Tudou, is owned by the…
Netflix may have missed out on its subscriber targets for the first quarter of 2017 by a small margin, but by the time this article goes to press, the SVoD (streaming video-on-demand) giant will be knocking on the door of the 100m subscriber milestone, as it approaches its tenth birthday. And it expects much of its user growth to come from mobile. Netflix added 4.95m subscribers in Q1 2017, to end the period with a total subscriber base of 98.75m in the US and internationally, of which 94.36m are paid memberships. Its international subscriber base grew by 3.53m in the quarter to total 47.89m, a number which is poised to overtake its 50.85m-strong domestic membership very soon. It has added…
The deadline has now passed for comment on US plans to mandate DSRC (dedicated short range communications) technology in vehicles to improve road safety. But the responses to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA’s) proposals reveal the splits over standardization in the connected car arena. The cellular community wants to push Cellular-V2X, based on LTE-V, the specialized variant of LTE for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. But there is a divide between the cellular approach and the 802.11ap, WiFi-based alternative, which offers all the pros and cons of an unlicensed spectrum solution (deployable by non-spectrum owners, but at risk of unreliable performance). In the US, the situation is slightly different. DSRC is based on 802.11p but has its…
The US-centric nature of much of the analysis of the connected car industry means it is often portrayed as a showdown between Motor City and Silicon Valley in the US, forgetting that a great deal of the innovation is happening in Asia. It is China’s search giant Baidu which has launched the most comprehensive attempt yet to provide a unified reference platform for autonomous driving. Of course, given the state of trade and technology rivalry between the US and China, its dreams of global adoption are unlikely to come true. The US is increasingly a large hole in the Chinese commercial map, just as China is for otherwise global firms like Google. But Baidu’s Project Apollo may help to accelerate…
We can no longer see 5G as a wireless standard alone. Its heart may still be a 3GPP-defined radio, but to deliver commercial benefits to operators (old or new), wireline links will be as important as wireless ones, and architectural change will be more important than an updated air interface. Several important developments over the past few weeks have originated in the wireline industry. The ITU’s (International Telecommunications Union’s) wireline division has published far-reaching recommendations for data aware networking to support 5G; more operators have joined CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Data center), an open source initiative with wireline roots, which now has a powerful mobile corollary. Activities like CORD will help accelerate uptake of software-defined networking (SDN) in…
Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference is becoming a very valuable barometer of the way mobile web markets are evolving. The past two years’ events were heavily focused on broadening and opening up its platforms, especially on mobile devices, to move well beyond social media and make it the hub for a user’s entire digital experience. They also saw the beginnings of Facebook’s attempt to disrupt the telecoms hardware platform by applying the open source approaches which have become the norm in software. The efforts to expand the Facebook platform into every aspect of a user’s life, and even into the telco market, have included an increasingly large dose of artificial intelligence (AI), so it was no surprise, at this year’s…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances WiLAN is buying IRD for $47.4m, with WiLAN planning on changing its name to Quarterhill, and adding IRD’s IIoT transport tech to its patent-licensing portfolio. The IPSO Alliance has announced work on the next generation of its IoT interoperability guidelines, and strong adoption for its Smart Object Guidelines – based on the OMA’s LWM2M standard. Comcast has joined the LoRa Alliance as a board member and sponsor, an announced it will be holding the next Open House – signaling an expansion of its machineQ project. The EdgeX Foundry has been launched by the Linux Foundation, with 50 companies joining to develop an open framework for IoT edge-computing. Laws, Regulation, and Lawsuits The EU has announced that it…
Facebook’s F8 conference saw the social media titan unveil a prototype brain interface for interacting with its web platform – a glimpse at a potential future in which thumbs are no longer the primary way of controlling a mobile device. It comes in the wake of a livestreamed murder, and Facebook is hoping that new machine-learning (ML) techniques will help if avoid such incidents in the future. The company has also open-sourced its Caffe2 deep-learning software, and has been working with Nvidia to better integrate the framework with Nvidia’s GPUs via hardware acceleration – although Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm have also announced support and optimization. Qualcomm’s immense mobile footprint is a juicy target for Facebook, and its Neural Processing…
Apple has received a permit from the Californian DMV, allowing it to test three autonomous Lexus SUVs. But a fleet of this size somewhat suggests that Apple is using the permit to trial software, rather than aiming for a major self-driving vehicle initiative based on hardware designs – to the relief of the established automakers. The move could potentially mark the company’s exit from the hardware game in autonomous cars, just as Google appears to be doing, having recently spun off its Waymo self-driving car project to focus solely on LiDAR sensors and software. However, with Apple being Apple, and its self-driving technologies being one of the industry’s most well-kept secrets, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the company take…
Baidu has launched Project Apollo, in a move to unite the automotive industry around its portfolio of autonomous driving technologies – including a software platform, hardware designs, and reference vehicles. However, the fairly insular approaches of automakers means that there is unlikely going to be much of a clamor to jump on board Apollo. The goal of Apollo is to provide an open software platform to its partners in the autonomous driving industry, so that they can develop their own driving systems based on Baidu’s reference design. Baidu believes its “robust, mature, and secure autonomous driving technology” can provide similar potential benefits as the Apollo lunar program, from which Baidu borrowed the name to convey its belief in the transformative…
HBO and Sky have inked a $250 million co-production deal for high-end dramas with the hope of creating the next Game of Thrones, as well as bulking up the pair’s combined content portfolios to challenge Netflix. The two companies plan to screen the first show in 2018 and green-light at least two dramas a year. Vivendi has been given one year to cut its stake in either Mediaset (28.8%) or Telecom Italia (24%) after the Italian communications regulator Agcom ruled that its stake-building actions in the two companies is in breach of antitrust laws. Vincent Bollore’s Vivendi has been given 60 days to submit a plan of action, and argued in a statement that it “neither controls nor exercises a…
UK regulator Ofcom is preparing to open up British Telecom’s ducts and poles so that rival broadband suppliers can lay fiber cheaply. It has a proposal out for feedback from the community It is by no means certain that BT’s broadband rivals will actually use this as a basis for initiating their own fiber networks nationwide, but they are almost certain to support the move on a “just in case” basis . Small local fiber providers need this kind of access, and companies like Vodafone may choose to lay fiber to support both its own network and small cell backhaul. Something similar happened in France years ago, and it has created a healthy competitive market for telecommunications services with consumer…
Netflix may have missed out on its subscriber targets for the first quarter of 2017 by a small margin, but by the time this article goes to press, the SVoD giant will be knocking on the door of the 100 million subscriber milestone – an achievement which deserves widespread recognition as the company approaches its 10th birthday. Netflix added 4.95 million subscribers in Q1 2017, to end the period with a total subscriber base of 98.75 million in the US and internationally, of which 94.36 million are paid memberships. Its international subscriber base grew by 3.53 million in the quarter to total 47.89 million, a number which is poised to overtake its 50.85 million strong domestic membership very soon. International…
The long-drawn out saga of the US’s 600 MHz incentive auction is over at last, and with Verizon and AT&T effectively sitting on their hands, the big winners are T-Mobile, Dish and Comcast. All three are seeking to disrupt the dominance of Verizon and AT&T, which until recently was looking almost like a duopoly. The end of the auction will also free players to pursue acquisitions again, once the FCC’s anti-collusion ‘quiet period’ ends. At that point, we may learn more details of the winners’ plans, but we can also expect to see T-Mobile and perhaps Sprint back in the M&A pool again by the end of the year. A number of smaller players have also secured licences – 23…
While many parts of the video eco-system have multiple players – at one point we could name 60 set top makers – the list for companies which offer forensic watermarking is exceptionally limited. By all means tell us of more you have found, but so far that list is around three – Nagra by its NexGuard acquisition which originally spun out of Philips, Verimatrix, which has had a product for around 13 years, and more recently ContentArmor, a spin-off from Technicolor, who was also in the game for quite a while, certainly since 2009. All of them have patents, and none of them have yet sued one another, so not the same or similar patents then, and all of them…
We have been talking about Beamr Imaging since IBC 2013 when the term “perceptual filter” was added to our vocabulary as a way of compressing video. The idea is simply to eliminate any detail that the human eye cannot see, simplifying the compression process and getting streams down to lower and lower bitrates. This week Beamr has caught up with the world of HEVC, and says it is ready with what it is calling 5x, claiming to support streams with 50% fewer bits for the same quality of video. This is similar to the claims made by codec specialist V-Nova recently when its second-generation Perseus codec emerged, but it has yet to implement a perceptual filter, which may take its…
The majority of video service providers are looking to Android TV to play a pivotal part of their future set-top strategies, as the traditional pay-TV players will eventually have to wave goodbye to the closed set-top environments which they have controlled for so long amid the transition to open platforms. According to a report from UK consulting firm Ovum, commissioned by Dutch security specialist Irdeto, 72% of video service providers are considering Android TV or Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) on their set-top roadmaps, while 63% say Android technologies are the most likely to be deployed on their new lines of set-tops. However, there should be some cause for concern that more respondents believe their organizations will roll out Android…
The Australian mobile market is mirroring that of the US in several important ways this year. There is a potentially disruptive broadband provider buying spectrum and looking to shake up the incumbents; calls for an incentive auction to open up broadcast airwaves for mobile operators; and arguments over how, and whether, the 3.5 GHz band should be shared. The new entrant is TPG, a fixed broadband provider which acquired 700 MHz spectrum in a recent auction of licences which were left on the table in a previous sale. The company has now announced that it has raised AU$320m through an institutional entitlement offer, to help fund the build-out of its mobile network. The bulk of the financing (AU$238m) came from…