Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… Netflix launched a single-device, mobile-only subscription service in Malaysia—priced at $4 a month—which Faultline predicted could mark the beginning of the end for account sharing. More than tackling the issue of password moochers however, Netflix’s Malaysian endeavor marked the SVoD’s will to tackle local streaming services, some of which were priced as low as $3 a month. Comcast has switched on DOCSIS 4.0 services in Atlanta, Georgia. The operator is serving up broadband packages ranging from 300 Mbps to 2 Gbps symmetrical speeds. Responding to cries from the wireless crowd for more spectrum, the US market will soon see 2700 MHz of spectrum released, including the 3 GHz, 7 GHz, 18 GHz and 37 GHz…
Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) technology has been doing the rounds as a turbocharger of existing residential coaxial wiring for two decades. For that reason, MoCA is often viewed as a technology fast fading from relevance, threatened by aggressive fiberoptic network overlays. Yet MoCA is not rolling over. The alliance itself is pushing the boundaries of MoCA’s premium coverage for WiFi backhaul and Intelligent NID (Network Interface Device) for operators offering triple play media services to customer homes – extending this into MDU fiber broadband and fixed wireless access (FWA) use cases. Voted into the role 8 months ago, MoCA President Marcos Martínez Vázquez, whose day job is Director of Standards Engineering at MaxLinear, tells Faultline on multiple occasions during…
Hollywood might finally return to work. News of SAG-AFTRA suspending the actors’ strike last week slipped under Faultline’s notice, but outside of announcing a deal had been reached, there was little public information about the agreement. Since then, the performer’s union published a summary of the proposed contract between the studios, assembled under the Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and 160,000 actors represented by SAG-AFTRA. One of the largest points of contention throughout the record 118 days of strike was the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI), as actors notably sought to protect themselves from studios using their digital likeness freely and in perpetuity, without fair compensation. Upon announcing the deal, the union had announced “unprecedented…
If tensions are ever going to flare on a panel, you can bet it will happen during a discussion zooming in on video codec patent pools. This Streaming Media Connect session, live streamed this week, saw the noose tighten around the neck of AOM, as Sisvel again sought to clarify the position that AV1 is not royalty-free. Meanwhile, the content-based licensing model is becoming more widely accepted (but still criticized), as seen by the recent arrival of the Avanci Video multi-codec patent pool, which houses licenses for HEVC, AV1, VP9, and VVC, as well as the MPEG-DASH suite of standards. Fresh with the knowledge that a Broadcom HEVC patent has this week been ruled invalid by a German court in…
Groundbreaking news hit the TV OS ecosystem last week: Amazon is ditching its Android Open Source Project (AOSP)-based Fire OS for a custom, Linux-powered operating system dubbed Vega. Amazon had the project in mind since 2017. It is now near completion, as tests on Fire TV streaming sticks have already taken place and launches will begin as early as next year, according to Lowpass. Amazon plans to use Vega for TVs, dongles, tablets—basically everything, including in-vehicle-infotainment applications. It even turns out that Vega has been hiding in plain sight, running a near-identical user experience to that of Fire OS for over a month now on the latest generation of the Echo Show 5 smart display (basically a smart speaker with…
Two companies operating in the hydrogen space came out this week with news about their stocks falling. Fusion Fuel and Plug Power seem to be going through some tough times, but this doesn’t mean the hydrogen industry is at any risk. The reasons for why the two companies are faced with financial turmoil are very different. To put it short Fusion Fuel banked on a niche hybrid technology, and it now shows it can’t compete on price while Plug Power has been affected by the rising prices of grey hydrogen – due to the increase in natural gas prices. But the precursor to the green hydrogen revolution is the electrolyzer and thus electrolyzer gigafactories. Which are slowly but surely coming.…
Cellnex Telecom will sell its private wireless network unit to neutral host provider Boldyn Networks, the value of the sale is €30 million. The acquisition is largely composed of Finnish subsidiary Edzcom, which Cellnex bought back in July 2020. This past week, Cellnex reported revenue of just over €3 billion in the first nine months of the year, an increase of 16% from 2022. Altice is in talks with buyers for its Portuguese business and a stake in its French unit to raise funds to reduce debt, according to Bloomberg. Vodafone and Accenture will partner on a services operation specializing in digital solutions and platforms, and deep AI. The entity will build on Vodafone’s shared services unit, Vodafone Intelligent Solutions…
Amazon is reportedly building an alternative operating system that will eventually replace the forked version of Android that powers its plethora of Fire devices. With Google currently embroiled in an anticompetition case in the US, which could spill out into major action to break the titan apart, Amazon is getting its ducks in order, should the wheels suddenly fall off the Android bandwagon. The report stems from Lowpass, citing multiple sources. Codenamed Vega, Amazon was apparently discussing the move with chipmakers as far back as 2017. While the going has evidently been slow, the pace of development has recently ramped up, and it has been tested on Fire TV dongles successfully – and could launch as early as 2024. Amazon…
Orange laid out its grand if unrealistic ambition of becoming Europe’s leading network integrator founded on Generative AI at a recent analyst event in London. This comes at a time all leading telcos are frantically trying to catch up with the hyperscalers and other major systems integrators over their AI strategies, having been slow in many cases to grasp how to harness their customer relationships, and hitch the associated OSS/BSS data securely to Generative AI models for commercial exploitation. This has risen up the agenda rapidly during 2023, punctuated by a series of events that have stimulated or illuminated the opportunities and imperatives for telcos. The first came at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in March, when the GSMA launched…
Open RAN aficionados gathered at the University of Bristol last week, to discuss the Open RAN and small cell systems of the future, at an event organized by Cambridge Wireless. Nick Johnson, head of UK Telecoms Innovation Network (UKTIN), gave an opening talk with an optimistic tone, reminding attendees that the network is getting simpler rather than more complicated, and calling guests to reach out to his agency for support. UKTIN was set up by the UK government to encourage supply chain diversification in the telco industry with open networks in mind, on the recommendation of the government’s 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy. Vodafone strategist Wael Boukley Hasan gave an account of Open RAN and massive MIMO, with examples from Vodafone’s Open…
The push for a next-gen broadcast TV standard should have been comfortably won by ATSC 3.0 – overseen by the Advanced Television Standards Committee. However, the compounding delays and IP uncertainty have opened the door for 5G Broadcast to arrive at an opportune time. There is a chance that the globally accepted 5G standards will become the vehicle for next-gen TV, making the 3GPP the kingmaker, not ATSC. As Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline, explored recently, the massive opportunity for ATSC 3.0 in India is slipping away, and given the country’s status as a 5G trendsetter, all eyes should be on the success of 5G Broadcast here. Faultline obtained damning documentation, showing the situation around the adoption of ATSC 3.0…
The EU is reaching a compromise over the controversial European cybersecurity bill under pressure from national governments, the open-source software community, and leading technology firms including telcos. However, in classic fashion, the fix appears last minute, and done in hindsight rather than from the outset. Both Nokia and Ericsson joined major European electronics and engineering groups, such as Siemens, Bosch and Scheider Electric in calling for modifications to avoid supply chain bottlenecks that would otherwise result from the proposed measures. There is concern that both hardware and software products, including consumer electronics equipment such as washing machines, would be bogged down in the associated approval process imposed in principle on all internet connected devices. There is always the suspicion when…
Non-profit Greening of Streaming (GoS) opened its curtains to the public for the second time ever in the November edition of its monthly members meeting. An observation from Faultline—easy to forget when projects in the industry are only presented with polished press releases at shiny trade shows—is how messy the organization of such endeavors can actually be. As an organization with 9 working groups and 4 projects focusing on delivering benchmarks for low energy sustainable streaming (LESS), GoS does not move uniformly in the slightest. Continuing on the trend shown last month, the bulk of the work conducted by the non-profit is being driven by Working Group 8, which seeks to measure the power output of consumer premises equipment.…
Netflix’s ad tier blew its first candle last week, as the streaming megalith celebrated the anniversary with an overly cheerful blogpost that hid the disappointment over subscriber numbers that Faultline sensed from Netflix’s Q3 results last week. While Q3 profit and revenue were more than satisfactory for the streamer, ad-tier growth tells another story. There are only 15 million monthly active users (MAUs) of the ad plan worldwide, representing solely 6% of Netflix’s total 247 million subscriber base. The streaming service again did not provide subscriber numbers for the ad-supported tier. Of course, the Netflix ad tier is only available in 12 countries, but as a comparison, Fox’s free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform Tubi has over 70 million MAUs,…
Traditional CDN revenues stabilized in the third quarter for Akamai, registering a minimal quarterly decline of just -0.3% to $379.3 million, and down only 4% on a year on year basis. With macroeconomic pressures and changing business models squeezing commercial CDNs, the company’s latest earnings affirm Akamai as a business positioned to profit from the ongoing consolidation of CDNs. This Q3 cushion is partly a result of inheriting enterprise customer contracts from StackPath, a deal which closed a week before the close of Q3, with Akamai recognizing $4 million from StackPath in the quarter. A similar deal which saw Akamai slurp up customer contracts from Lumen’s CDN business closed in Q4, so those sales will be reflected in the next…
As social media video eats into traditional TV watch times, pirates are having an easier job of sharing premium content. Without any specialist hardware or software, the average person can ‘go live’ and share their screen, all while feeding off the back-end infrastructure of some of the largest technology companies in the world. We saw this come to the fore recently, as La Liga, the Spanish soccer league, called out TikTok as a growing hub for piracy of its content. Our chat this week with Israeli video fingerprinting vendor Videocites has re-instilled an element of faith that some security vendors can tackle this seamless piracy on social media, although it seems that these capabilities do not extend to the rest…
Destructive scenes of wildfires and desperate calls for an emergency replacement TV platform are not typical depictions found in press releases filed by the Faultline news desk. An announcement brings to light a recent dilemma, with a pay TV operator given just six weeks’ notice to launch an alternative TV service, after the signal provider for its cable TV offering – Canada’s Shaw Communications – decided to suddenly shutter its service for economic reasons. The besieged operator is Île-à-la-Crosse Communications Society (ICSI), a rural Canadian cable TV provider nestled in the sprawling Saskatchewan province, bordering the US States of Montana and North Dakota to the south. A combination of wildfires and Shaw’s shutdown memo getting lost in the post culminated…
As demand for analytics in the video industry grows higher than ever, certain quality of experience (QoE) tools have become the bare minimum required to operate in the ecosystem, casting calls of commoditization over analytics vendors needing to maintain differentiating facets in order to stay alive. Nonetheless, alongside that risk, the omnipresence of metrics requires a certain level of standardization to ensure communication and interoperability. That is a point that all panelists speaking on Faultline’s penultimate webinar of the year, centered on the commoditization of streaming analytics, agreed on. IMAX’s Chief Product Officer, Abdul Rehman, co-founder of perceptual quality metric developer SSIMwave, and co-chair of the Streaming Video Technology Alliance’s (SVTA) QoE working group, pointed out the need for standards…
Another Chinese perovskite startup has raised angel round financing, with $13.75 million for Tianjiao New Energy (天交新能源)’s 10 MW pilot line. Like most of its peers this is a single-junction company aiming at the BIPV segment and small applications such as EV roofs. Meanwhile LONGi has confirmed a 33.9% perovskite tandem cell efficiency with KAUST and NREL, and Aolian Solar has produced its first perovskite solar module, with a 60*60cm size, from its 50 MW production line. The American Council of Renewable Energy (ACRE) has request that PJM Interconnection expand its approach to transmission planning to further transfer connection with the Midcontinent System Operator. ACRE claims that increased transfer links between the two grids would save $15 billion by 2035.…
Vodafone has agreed to sell its Spanish operations to Zegona Communications, a UK investment firm, for some €5 billion ($5.3 billion). The deal still requires regulatory clearance, but Vodafone has long wanted to exit the tough Spanish market. Also in Spain, the sovereign investment fund may acquire a stake in Telefonica, as a protective measure to prevent STC buying some 9.9% – for around €2.1 billion. Meanwhile, Telefonica has announced a 300,000-unit water meter deal in Sevilla, using its NB-IoT network. Uzbekistan’s Perfectum (Rubicon Wireless Communications) has commissioned Nokia to power its 5G Standalone upgrade path, and a separate business development deal with e& (Etisalat) that will “boost the development of both its technical and commercial operations.” Nokia is demonstrating…