Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
A summary of OTT Video News – Deals, Launches and products. Netflix is upgrading its encoding for programming and will cut its bandwidth requirements by up to 20%. US magazine Variety was given a live demo of Netflix’s updated encoding technology and says it will adjust the streaming bitrate based on the type of content being streamed as well as the user’s bandwidth. Before this, Netflix would reduce bitrates down to 235 Kbps for slower connections, but it says it would still aim to provide a top-shelf stream with 5.8 Mbps bitrate for all programming. Live action programming requires higher programming but animated shows can be reproduced in 1080p at as little as 1.5 Mbps. It could be a new…
Google has now said that its revolutionary WiFi First mobile services in the US is not just for smartphones. Fi customers will be able to add up to nine devices, including iPads, using free data-only SIMs, as Google continues to disrupt the US mobile model. Remember Google Fi is a combination MVNO across either T-Mobile or Sprint, plus WiFi. Using a free data-only SIM card ordered from their Project Fi online account page, customers can access cellular networks at a flat rate of $10 per gigabyte. The option is only available, for now at least, to those who already subscribe to the main Fi service, which charges $20 a month for unlimited domestic talk and text, unlimited international texts, WiFi…
British Telecom (BT) has taken the crown from TalkTalk for the highest volume of complaints in the pay TV sector this quarter, according to results from British regulator Ofcom. Sky has come out tops again, as it preserved a well below industry average of 2 complaints for every 100,000 customers in Q3 2015, and received an overall lower volume of pay TV complaints from the previous quarter. Ofcom reports that BT received 25 complaints for every 100,000 customers. BT’s latest investors report says it now has 1.14 million BT TV customers, this means it had around 285 officially reported complaints in total – 0.25% of its entire pay TV customer base complained. When put in this perspective it seems like…
Despite failing in almost every attempt to go to market with a branded TV service, Disney is going for the big one, taking on China with a service it hasn’t even launched in the US yet. And it will partner e-commerce giant Alibaba to achieve it. It will open its new OTT streaming service DisneyLife in China, just months after launching it in the UK and it will simultaneously enter the streaming dongle market. However, Disney is ignoring all the basic tenants of the OTT market place, it wants you to just watch Disney programs on this particular dongle when all the successful device, even Apple TV, have had to open up to all the major OTT brands out there…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Fujitsu is pressing ahead with its smart agriculture ambitions, opening the FPT Akisai Farm and Vegetable Factory in Hanoi, Vietnam, in partnership with FPT Corporation, using Fujitsu’s Akisai Agricultural Cloud platform to ultra-efficiently grow crops. Fujitsu is also licensing Round Rock’s UHF RFID tag patents, for use in its Frontech division. Atmel has received a higher bid than the bid it had accepted from Dialog, prompting the board to begin buyout talks with the unnamed all-cash bidder. HyperCat Consortium proponent Flexeye has launched a HyperCat incubator in Hyderabad, India, to gain a foothold with startups and India’s government-backed smart city program. Philips and Cisco have announced a new alliance to sell lighting solutions, designing a joint go-to-market…
Wide area networks for the IoT grow in number almost by the week. A score of systems are jostling to fill the vacuum that exists in the cellular world, at least for now. GSM may support the majority of the world’s wireless machine-to-machine connections, but its battery life is too short for some important emerging use cases, in which devices need to be able to be left untended for years. And LTE has to wait another year or more for commercial, standardized kit that meets the IoT requirements of extremely low power, cost and latency. Many technologies are filling the void, each of them hoping to build sufficient critical mass to survive the emergence of the LTE standards (Cat-M modems…
The automotive industry feared that if mapping firm Here were to be snapped up by a technology company, it would monopolize in-vehicle mapping systems, and cut car makers out of the picture – but a consortium of German automakers stands in the way, for now. Following the completion of Nokia’s sale of its Here mapping unit to a consortium including car manufacturers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes (Daimler-Benz), for $3.1bn, it will be interesting to see in which direction the automakers push Here – which currently claims to supply the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems for every four out of five vehicles. The most immediate conclusion is that the purchase was made in order to further the group’s ambitions for autonomous cars, which…
The IoT sits behind the technology that will drive future urbanization, and Fujitsu is looking to corner a market. With its new smart agriculture factory in Vietnam, the Japanese company is looking to prove the utility of its very efficient IoT farming processes, which allows crops to be grown much closer to the point of consumption. There are numerous potential energy savings to be made in this model, chief of which is the cost of transportation – as produce needs to be less distance in total. Similarly, there are vast savings to be made in the reduced need for pesticides, as the crops are grown in controlled environments, typically indoors, where pests and weeds pose a negligible or non-existent problem.…
Mozilla has announced that it has abandoned its smartphone ambitions for Firefox OS. According to Ari Jaaksi, SVP Connected Devices, Mozilla will use the technology from the web-centric operating system to enter the IoT – branding the announcement as a new beginning rather than an end. It’s a similar fate to the one that Samsung’s Tizen OS has suffered. Initially something of a bargaining chip in case Google began tightening the leash over its use of Android in Samsung handsets, Tizen was meant to provide an OS that Samsung could leap to if its Android licenses were revoked by Google – as the Android parent was growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of non-standard apps (bloatware) that Samsung was pushing…
Worth noting the latest in OTT video news, deals, launches and products Vodafone Portugal has selected Ericsson’s Media Delivery Network (MDN) for improving the consumer video experience while reducing operational expenditure. Vodafone Portugal is updating its network using Ericsson’s MDN to cope with the rapid increase in video consumption, it will enable the shift of recording from set tops to the cloud. By caching content at various locations across its network, Vodafone Portugal can also minimize the distance that video data travels, enhancing speed and efficiency. TV applications solutions company Accedo has helped Mediaset Espana launch an OTT service Mitele. Accedo will provide its AppGrid application management solution for cloud configurability, and the systems were developed using the Accedo Via…
The automotive industry feared that if mapping firm Here was to be snapped up by a technology company, it would monopolize in-vehicle mapping systems, and cut car makers out of the picture – but a consortium of German automakers stands in the way, for now. Following the completion this week of Nokia’s sale of its Here mapping unit to car manufacturers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes (Daimler-Benz), for $3.1 billion, it will be interesting to see in which direction the German automakers push Here; it is likely to dominate in Europe, but could it compete with Apple and Google in the US? First impressions are that autonomous cars are the major prize on everyone’s mind. This collaborative purchase is a clear…
French press sources this week have pointed to the existence of early-stage talks between Orange and Bouygues over a merger. Our take is that the anti-trust hurdles in its way would derail such a move on either broadband or mobile over-concentration. It is more likely however that Orange may look for content assets from Bouygues elsewhere within the conglomerate, and not get bogged down in an anti-trust tussle unless the Government gives it tacit approval. Last week Orange went as far as denying reports that it was in merger talks with Telecom Italia, and instead it dropped strong hints that it was pursuing other acquisitions – hence Bouygues. Now everyone in the French market has at some time or another…
As fiber access becomes critical for multiplay and mobile backhaul, cellcos are stepping up their actions to secure wireline assets. Access to fiber is becoming as important to Vodafone as extending its 4G networks, as the company casts aside the mobile-only model which made it great and chases European incumbents into the quad play. It has been vocal recently about the need for regulation to be eased to allow investment in wireline services, to support many business cases from mobile backhaul to fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) to smart cities. And when it finds the climate too tough, it will resort to the law courts, as it has done this week with a suit filed against Dutch telco KPN. KPN is in turmoil…
Battery technology is critical to the future of the mobile Internet, as well as sustainable energy applications, and so it has become the focus of intensive research. As a result, there are numerous candidates, many sharing in common, an emphasis on fabrication of both electrodes and the electrolyte connecting them at the molecular level. This is referred to as nanoscale because it involves dimensions in the order of one nanometer, which is one billionth of a meter and around the diameter of larger molecules. The principle is simply that the construction at the molecular level determines the battery’s key parameters, its charge storage capacity, discharge rate and recharge rate. More specifically these are governed by the density at which positive…
Big Blue is splashing more cash on beefing up its cloud-based offerings, this week acquiring Clearleap along with its video platform, for an unspecified amount. Clearleap counts HBO, TWC, Verizon and BBC America among its customer list, and provides video services that deliver content to multiscreen devices, as well as an open API framework for app building and workflow management, and the subscription and monetization services that accompany these OTT assets. Clearleap gives IBM a full stack of OTT software, which it can then use to challenge Cisco, Alcatel (now Nokia), and Ericsson, as well as construct new services from the myriad of component pieces it now owns. Suddenly, IBM finds itself firmly in the video game, with a very…
Access to fiber is becoming as important to Vodafone as extending its 4G networks, as the company casts aside the mobile-only model which made it great and chases European incumbents into the quad play. It has been vocal recently about the need for regulation to be eased to allow investment in wireline services, to support many business cases from mobile backhaul to fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) to smart cities. And when it finds the climate too tough, it will resort to the law courts, as it has done this week with a suit filed against Dutch telco KPN. KPN is in turmoil of its own, with America Movil of Mexico putting its 21.1% stake in the telco up for sale, and France…
Last week Orange denied reports that it was in merger talks with Telecom Italia, but dropped strong hints that it was pursuing other acquisitions. This week it seemed its interest may lie closer to home – it was said to be in early discussions with Bouyues, which owns France’s third mobile operator. Those reports were denied too, but new rumors swirled – that the French leader might be interested in Belgium’s Proximus, or The Netherlands’ KPN. And meanwhile, Xavier Niel, chairman of Iliad, which has caused so much of the recent upheaval in Orange’s home market, added to the complexity by revealing he had spent €225.31m on building up his share of Telecom Italia’s options to over 15%. According to…
The saga of US satellite/LTE operator LightSquared twists on. Once a bright hope to introduce new competition and business models to US mobile broadband, via a wholesale-only 4G network built in mobile satellite spectrum, the venture foundered amid claims of interference with nearby GPS services and was forced into Chapter XI bankruptcy protection in 2012. The firm has now exited Chapter 11 and settled the first of several outstanding lawsuits with the GPS industry, two moves which could pave the way to a revival of its wireless challenge. It hopes that its settlement with GPS provider Deere may be a template for similar deals with other opponents, and for broader approval from the FCC for a revised approach to LTE.…
Nokia has completed the sale of its Here mapping business to a group of German car manufacturers, in a move which ends the dream of creating its own web services platform around the location software, but which may see that platform taking an important role in shaping the future of connected and autonomous car standards. The Finnish firm paid $8.1bn for Navteq, whose technology became the foundation for Nokia Maps and the cloud-based Here services, and got just $2.8bn back from selling it on eight years later, to a group made up of Audi, BMW and Daimler. The deal, concluded in August, valued the business at €2.8bn, subject to certain adjustments. Following those, Nokia’s net proceeds were €2.55bn ($2.8bn). This…
Wide area networks for the Internet of Things (IoT) grow in number almost by the week. A score of systems are jostling to fill the vacuum that exists in the cellular world, at least for now. GSM may support the majority of the world’s wireless machine-to-machine connections, but its battery life is too short for some important emerging use cases, in which devices need to be able to be left untended for years. And LTE has to wait another year or more for commercial, standardized kit that meets the IoT’s requirements of extremely low power, cost and latency. Many technologies are filling the void, each of them hoping to build sufficient critical mass to survive the emergence of the LTE…