Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The Small Cell World Summit (SCWS) in London is a highlight of this sector’s calendar, and last week it celebrated its tenth annual event. The show has mirrored the history of small cell networks to date, which has been the usual mixture, in the mobile world, of innovation, disruption, inflated expectations and frustrations. But in 2016, the broader mobile platform has caught up with the small cell pioneers – with densification and in-building networks at the heart of many operators’ investment plans, the miniaturized base stations have crossed into the mainstream, with significant implications for operators’ approach to deployment and financing; and for the incumbent wireless vendors. So how far has this industry segment, and the Small Cell Forum which…
The Latest OTT Video News, Deals, Launches and Products from the team behind Faultline. Media Partners Asia says that a report it will publish in June will show that online video revenue in the Asia Pacific region will reach $35 billion by 2021, with a CAGR of 22% up from $13 billion today. MPA says China will be the largest market, with 75% of Asia Pacific online video revenue by 2021 with Japan, Australia, Korea and India only making up 17% of the remaining revenue by 2021. Online video advertising accounts for under 15% of Asia Pacific digital ad spend now, but that this will grow to 22% by 2021. America Movil’s Chilean operation Claro will use Harmonic’s X3 Electra…
Vizio has been shipping its new P-Series UHD HDR Home Theater TVs for about two months and the reviews so far are very positive. As Vizio almost always does, they are aimed for the mass market with the 50-inch model priced at $999. UHD 4K and HDR are, we think, the minimum that consumers should insist on when buying a TV. Both are open industry standards and available for any set top maker to use. Vizio uses Dolby Vision technology to play content in HDR. Chromecast dongles are not needed because all the P-Series sets have Google Cast technology embedded. Any smartphone, tablet or PC with the Google Cast app can project, or cast, to the P-Series TVs any video…
Vodafone’s grand ambition to become a global top five brand, as well as a top quad play operator, still looks far from being achieved – but at least its annual results give the Newbury based company some cause for cheer. Both service revenues and core earnings grew for the first time since 2008, up respectively by 2.3% at £41 billion ($60 billion) and 2.7% at £11.6 billion ($17 billion) for its year ending March 31st 2016, with predictions of acceleration this year. Vodafone claimed this showed that its global fixed network expansion program, which has cost £19 billion ($28.8 billion), is at last paying fruit, although this does not seem to be reflected in direct broadband revenue growth. The gains…
Kaltura has unveiled its new Video Platform as a Service (VPaaS) offering this week, a product the company is calling the world’s first specialized cloud video service. There are plenty of cloud-based video offerings on the market right now, some, but not all, provided as a service, so it’s difficult to see why Kaltura is making this claim. We can point out companies such as Quickplay Media, Vidmind, Amazon, Viaccess-Orca, Nagra, Brightcove, Ooyala, and Net Insight, to name but a few – all providing similar, but quite different services. What Kaltura says VPaaS does is allow software as a service (SaaS) providers, integrators, and developers to add video capabilities and integrate video as a built-in data type into existing platforms…
We have followed Quickplay Media for a few years now and it is safe to say that an exit by becoming the OTT arm of a major tier 1 operator always looked on the cards to us, so we were unsurprised when AT&T stepped up and bought it this week. Quickplay has no real intellectual property to distinguish it, instead it has what you might called good old fashioned know how. It just gets video jobs done and done right for its clients. It uses best of breed encoders, it supports any encryption operator ask for and focuses on making sure every step of the OTT journey is carried out exactly how its clients expect. In that sense it has…
Wearables Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have unveiled SkinTrack, a ring that allows a wrist-based wearable to track gestures made on an arm, picked up by the wearable’s electrodes. Connected Vehicles Volvo is launching a trial with urb-it, which will see urb-it delivery staff able to access the trunk of certain connected Volvo cars, in order to deliver purchases to a driver – within two-hours, according to urb-it’s business model. Logitech has launched the Zero Touch in the US and Germany, which is a phone adapter that provides gesture and voice control. Microsoft is testing its self-driving car, based on a VW wagon. Apple has invested $1bn in China’s dominant ride-sharing service, Didi. Smart Cities Silver Spring Networks has announced…
CoreOS has raised $28m in a second round of financing led by its most strategic supporter Google – money which will help it compete against Docker to be the dominant platform for containerizing Linux applications. The use of containers is rising rapidly in the enterprise market and CoreOS, which uses Google’s Chrome code base, is an alternative to the most common engine, Docker, and others like Joyent. Originally, CoreOS created a lightweight open source Linux distribution which supported Docker containers, but as it gained ground – and Google support – it created a rival engine, rkt, which claims superior security functionality to Docker’s, and a growing range of associated tools. rkt is the basis of its Tectonic container deployment solution.…
The legal battle between Oracle and Google, regarding allegations that Android infringes on Java copyright, has never achieved the high drama of the Apple-Samsung saga, but it has far more far-reaching implications for the mobile community. It has gone to trial for the second time this week, and the stakes are even higher than last time. Oracle is demanding far higher damages than last time – $8.8bn, one of the biggest sums ever proposed in a trial of this kind – if Google is found to have infringed Java copyright when it designed Android. Google used its own Java Virtual Machine in Android, rather than licensing the platform from Sun (Java’s owner, subsequently acquired by Oracle). But Oracle alleges that…
The world’s two most populous countries, India and China, are both opening up their mobile markets, relaxing the limits on MVNOs and granting new licences – even as there is consolidation in the face of rising competition and price wars. In India’s case, this is likely to see the disappearance of several tier two brands, and potentially the merger of the two state-run telcos, BSNL and MTNL. In China, the three state-controlled operators are increasingly sharing infrastructure, and there have been rumors that the two smaller ones, China Unicom and China Telecom, might merge entirely. Despite that, the government has just awarded a fourth telecoms licence. This has gone to China Broadcasting Network (CBN), a cable operator, which now has…
The traditional core of the mobile industry still runs shy of open source. Qualcomm may have made some concessions to the new world with activities like AllSeen, but in general, mobile technologies are still run by traditional standards bodies and industry alliances with complex patent sharing deals and strictly controlled development processes. But the new giants of the mobile world have a very different view of open source, seeing it as a way to drive innovation, accelerate development and share costs. Sophisticated players like Google are expert in making their inventions open, to gain the benefits of a broad ecosystem and eager developers’ efforts, while retaining a tight level of control over the roadmap (though that control has slipped somewhat…
Some trends which are becoming certainties. One, mobile operator growth (or sometimes survival) will depend on implementing ever-more heterogeneous networks, virtualizing many of their functions, and supporting a wide range of services and applications. Two, attracting and retaining customers is increasingly down to the quality of user experience, not price, which means taking a far more rigorous approach to managing and optimizing the network. These two are very hard to support in parallel. Monitoring, performance management and optimization approaches are evolving, but are still inadequate for many of the new networks. Management and orchestration of virtual networks is immature and the subject of deep splits over the best approach. Even without considering NFV/SDN, there is limited ability to manage wireless,…
Alphabet’s Nest has announced the release of OpenThread, an open source version of its Thread mesh networking protocol, on GitHub, under a BSD license. It’s a strange announcement, as the Thread Group itself hasn’t actually made it, but Nest is pretty upbeat about the news – as it should be, given that it has been the main driver behind the protocol. It reads a little like the Thread Group isn’t as upbeat about the news as Nest – perhaps hinting at some internal strategy disagreements in the Group. A blog post by the Thread Group only notes that it is “very pleased” at the development, before clarifying that Thread itself is not open source, just that Nest has offered an…
Dutch start up Pycom has secured another investment round for its low energy triple bearer IoT development boards LoPy and WiPy – this time from Hong Kong based In-Tech Electronics. The WiPy launched last year, and now the LoPy board has been causing quite a stir in the industry by combining LoRa, WiFi and BLE, so much so that it managed to hit its Kickstarter target in just 5 days, raising over $136,000. The term disruptive has become almost throwaway in the IoT, but products like the LoPy have the potential to cause genuine seismic shifts in the market – by combining chipsets, as LoPy has done. But is this a step towards an option for a single IoT radio…
MaxLinear seems to have that kind of acquisition knack which turns an also ran into a jewel, and has just completed its successful integration of Entropic, the silicon specialist that brought us the MoCA connectivity silicon, and now it has turned its attention to making money off 5G, by buying a piece of Broadcom. Broadcom, for its part, under Avago’s management, seems to be hell bent on getting rid of distractions and focusing on size. It sold off its low margin, low volume, but highly regarded IoT business last month including its Wiced SoC chips, which included most of its ZigBee work. It was aimed at the wearable market, but was itself not wearing well. It sold that to Cypress…
Just a few weeks ago Amazon launched a standalone video subscription service that undercuts Netflix. Now it has mounted its very own YouTube challenger with a new consumer-centric video site, Amazon Video Direct. Amazon Video Direct encapsulates four different distribution models; free videos for Prime members; videos to buy or rent for a one off fee; free ad-supported videos for all Amazon Video customers; and as an add-on subscription through Amazon’s Streaming Partners Program. Content owners will be able to choose any combination of these options to earn royalties. It may look like Amazon is several years late to YouTube’s party, but this announcement follows a trend in which online video sites are not just purely imitating YouTube’s successful (but…
The Walt Disney Company is reportedly in advanced stages with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) to cough up $1 billion to acquire one third of its video streaming technology arm BAM Tech. If Disney is beaten to the video technology prize by the NFL, then this would create a sports powerhouse in the US that could perpetuate ESPN’s recent turmoil – which is why Disney is willing to sign a deal that could cost it some $3 billion to $4 billion per year, as it pursues a controlling stake. It’s no surprise that Disney is placing the future of ESPN so high on its priority list, as the subsidiary forms the backbone of Media Networks which last year generated…
The legal battle between Oracle and Google, regarding allegations that Android infringes on Java copyright, has never achieved the high drama of the Apple-Samsung saga, but it has far more far-reaching implications for the mobile community. It has gone to trial for the second time this week, and the stakes are even higher than last time. Oracle is demanding far higher damages than last time – $8.8 billion, one of the biggest sums ever proposed in a trial of this kind – if Google is found to have infringed Java copyright when it designed Android. Google used its own Java Virtual Machine in Android, rather than licensing the platform from Sun (Java’s owner, subsequently acquired by Oracle). But Oracle alleges…
NextVR has just wrapped up a successful live broadcast of the Kentucky Derby, and has also announced an upcoming deal with music events company Live Nation that will see NextVR add gigs to its VR video portal. Last year’s Kentucky Derby was the most-watched TV program in May, averaging some 16 million viewers – some way behind the average turn out for NFL games, which clocked in between 24 and 26 million viewers in 2015, but considerably more than the Thursday night offerings and the London early-morning expo games that averaged around 8.6 million, which is around the same number as Survivor manages. Comcast’s NBC held the rights to the Derby, and the NBC Sports Group looked to NextVR to…
The European Commission has delivered a huge blow to the idea of VULA (virtual unbundled local access) broadband right the way across Europe, as it has moved to open an investigation into precisely how the practice is being introduced in Germany by Deutsche Telekom since 2012. For the uninitiated VULA came about as a way to promote vectoring in telco based broadband. Broadly speaking vectoring can take copper twisted pair broadband up to 50 Mbps (depending upon the exact distance the node is from the home), but if all of the lines in a wiring bundle have their interference cancelled in the same server together, it can go closer to 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps for two bonded pairs. From…