Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… Plume announced at Broadband World Forum in Berlin that it was open sourcing some key elements of its WiFi architecture, which had previously allowed it to conquer Comcast, Liberty Global and Bell Canada in WiFi cloud management. One takeout from a rodeo bull-type conversation with Plume CEO Fahri Diner, was the revelation that Plume was installed on all Virgin Media home gateways. Overall, Faultline assessed that the open sourcing move was an attempt to make operators believe they were getting something for free, when they were actually acquiring hooks into a set of Plume cloud apps. This was the start of OpenSync. Major movement in the codec patent landscape sees Avanci launch a multi-codec patent pool…
The Independent Streaming Alliance (ISA) has achieved the first major objective necessary to the survival of the alliance: measuring its size and audience impact. The group of 10 niche AVoD and FAST providers have evaluated that the ISA reaches nearly 18 million US TV households, equivalent to around 15% of the country’s viewership. Making use of iSpot.tv’s panel of 40 million smart TVs, the group measured a cross-section of advertising campaigns over the span of two months, leading to over 1.5 billion impressions in the blind study, which ensured members did not their reveal usage data to each other. The data will help the group navigate a FAST ad purchase ecosystem that is still in its infancy, and attract advertisers…
Media policy was the focus of the latest Sustainability Experts Series, spotlighting how the heavy hand of regulation is forcing greater accountability and responsibility in streaming – an industry which has gone largely unregulated since its inception. As such, people in high places are still trying to figure out how to regulate new services. One of those is the electronic program guide (EPG), and with the EPG central to viewing experiences, regulation of IP-based linear TV guides on connected devices and smart TVs will spread like a rash across content and related services in the streaming realm. John Enser, a media lawyer and regulatory advisor at CMS Law Tax, notes that a widely-used free streaming service like Samsung TV Plus…
From the outside, Accedo appears to be positioned as a broker for video technology tools and services – sometimes even showing signs of becoming a consultancy business like Accenture. The C-word is a dirty one to video software developers like Accedo, and with the company’s broker-esque partner ecosystem strategy in mind, we should remember that there are always proprietary hooks waiting to reel in revenue. With the Accedo One marketplace now well-established since first teased at IBC 2019, and a dedicated sustainability marketplace in the works for 2025, Accedo has plugged the gap with a new marketplace to foster pre-integrations among partner vendors – this time built around immersive experiences, with a penchant for spatial computing. Accedo evidently should have…
With Lumen Technologies exiting the CDN business, following its sale of customer contracts to Akamai, so too does the US ISP withdraw from related CDN industry initiatives involved with R&D and standards development. One of those is the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA), a Lumen representative has confirmed to Faultline. However, while Lumen states as plain as day, “We will no longer participate in the SVTA and its initiatives”, the SVTA itself is not ready to sever ties so abruptly and definitively with one of its larger members. “That does not mean that Lumen will not participate in other initiatives,” countered a response from the SVTA’s Executive Director, Jason Thibeault. It’s true that Lumen may decide to stick around in…
After the 148-day-long WGA strike finally came to a close, recently reopened negotiations have collapsed between some 350 Hollywood studios and 160,000 unionized performers. The former, banded together under the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) umbrella, called off discussions with the performers’ union SAG-AFTRA last week, stating the sides were too far apart. Despite A-listers like George Clooney and Scarlett Johansson (among others) meeting with SAG-AFTRA leadership to try and pressure a return to the negotiation table, it is likely discussions may be in limbo for a while. Writers are back to work, with studio AI abuse concerns lifted until 2026, but actors are still in the thick of it. The deal struck between the Writers Guild…
Twenty-one months after Microsoft shocked the industry with the announcement of its record-breaking $68.7 billion purchase of video game developer Activision Blizzard King (ABK), the tech giant has passed the final (meaningful) regulatory hurdle to the largest acquisition in its history, just as Netflix comes knocking on the door of the cloud gaming world. Contrary to what the merger’s critics may believe, Microsoft has not been handed dominion over the small field that is cloud gaming, which as of 2022 represents 1% of the global gaming market. If nothing, regulatory scrutiny over the deal proves there is significant interest in the sector, with novel players too, as recently demonstrated by Netflix. The streaming titan revealed in a blog post this…
Graphite producer Datong Xincheng New Materials (XCG) has entered perovskites with an agreement with two universities to develop an R&D center, bringing the total number of Chinese perovskite companies we’re aware of to 23. CleanCo, an energy company owned by the Australian state of Queensland, intends to add 3 GW of clean energy capacity in order to support the state’s renewable energy targets. This capacity will be obtained via project development acquisitions, joint venture investments, and off taker agreements, with an Expression of Interest process opened through November 17th. The EU’s Internal Market and International Trade Committees have adopted a draft regulation banning import and export of goods made with forced labor, including a framework for investigating companies’ supply chains,…
The Dell’Oro Group predicts that global telecom capex will fall 7% between 2022 and 2025. “Capex acceleration remains a transitory phenomenon in a world where neither 4G nor 5G has been able to change the revenue trajectory,” it declares. Vodafone is reportedly about to issue a major Open RAN RFQ, covering its entire global footprint of 170,000 sites. Announced at the FYUZ conference, Vodafone is also testing Open RAN deployments in Italy, with Nokia. This appears to signal a major uptick for Open RAN in 2025. Vodafone and Arm have announced a development partnership, focused on a new chipset designed for Open RAN applications. SynaXG and Ampere will test and validate the design, with Fujitsu supplying the RAN software that…
The Japanese cellular market appears to be on the brink of significant change, but not in the way that many observers had expected when e-commerce giant Rakuten first launched into the mobile business. Rather than Japan’s incumbents being up-ended as India’s were by Reliance Jio or France’s by Free Mobile, it is likely that the big three – NTT Docomo, KDDI and Softbank – will remain firmly in charge. Reports abound that KDDI is poised to acquire Rakuten Mobile, while NTT Docomo is edging ahead of the challenger in developing an Open RAN platform that it can market to operators round the world. When Rakuten launched its mobile operator in 2020, there was speculation that the Japanese operators – technically…
Vodafone has been the most active of the large operators in seeking to drive the Open RAN ecosystem to address one of its biggest challenges – the lack of a fully open architecture at semiconductor level. The MNO already has significant partnerships with Qualcomm and Intel, and has established a European Open RAN silicon lab in Spain, where most of the big names in mobile chips are working on interoperability and common interfaces. Now Vodafone has expanded its efforts, and is working with both Intel and Arm, in a bid to ensure that both the main processor and accelerator platforms are embedded into emerging Open RAN platforms – heading off a scenario in which Intel could achieve the same kind…
Huawei has emerged from the ravages of US-led sanctions to resume growth and profitability, by focusing most strongly on nonaligned countries that are still open to the vendor for LTE and 5G equipment. This has become increasingly evident over the past year, culminating in successful sponsorship of the 14th Global Mobile Broadband (MBB) this month in Dubai, which we touch on in a separate article concerning FWA this week. Huawei has evolved a three-pronged global strategy, the first concentrated on the domestic Chinese marker, the second being on those countries where it has been at least partially excluded, mostly in Europe. The third prong is targeting non-aligned countries, chiefly in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America, where many operators…
The European Commission (EC) has opted not to rush into regulation, with Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton publishing a LinkedIn post that effectively shunts any such decision into the new year. This is part of the ‘fair contribution’ debate, which we have lambasted previously, but the low-key nature of the announcement suggests a climbdown. The rhetoric surrounding ‘fair share,’ the position that the traffic on ISP networks is a burden unfairly placed on the network operators, had been intensifying in recent months. Breton’s announcement should dampen expectations, but the commissioner does argue that the EC should attempt to address ‘market fragmentation.’ Key to this will be the Digital Networks Act, but there is no more detail for this plan currently…
Five years ago this week… Netflix promised to stop counting free trialists in subscriber numbers, just as the SVoD’s base reached 130 million subs globally. In its Q3 2018 results, Netflix pledged to guide only to paid memberships by January 2019, and stop counting free trial users in its subscriber base by the beginning of 2020. The elimination of the free trialist count served as a final move quashing any debate analysts had as over the credibility of Netflix’s subscriber growth. Fast forward to 2023, Netflix is drawing attention away from subscribers as a core metric of success, and towards the bottom line – an attempt to build pressure on its less-profitable streaming rivals. Following high-profile recent blackouts triggered by…
Commercial factors alone dictate that energy efficiency has become more critical than ever for mobile operators, with sustainability serving to turn the screw and requiring additional monitoring and reporting capabilities. While successive 3GPP releases have themselves delivered advancing energy saving capabilities, through more fine-grained sleep modes and standards for coordination among components, with more to come under the banner of 5G Advanced, fine tuning is still required in the field – with the help of machine learning. This rather obvious point emerged at the recent Open RAN Global Forum where sustainability issues reigned over the agenda. Coordination, optimization and automation are especially critical for Open RAN deployments, which provide opportunities for energy efficiency as well as challenges resulting from the…
Delivering on its transparency pledge, sustainability non-profit Greening of Streaming has opened its monthly members meetings to the public. Contributors were noticeably wary of external prying eyes during the first open live stream, from which Faultline’s consensus is that the bulk of tangible progress is gravitating towards working group 8 – consumer premises equipment. The headline act came from France-based Radiant Media Player, revealing it has established preliminary energy consumption data across a wide scope of smart TV sets. CEO Arnaud Leyder presented energy data published on consumer-oriented energy rating labels by smart TV manufacturers complying with EU regulations. The most significant finding from Leyer’s presentation is that LED and OLED display types consume practically the same amount of…
A flimsy survey-style report on the digital advertising market in Japan and Asia Pacific (JAPAC) has found that despite some green intentions, many vendors are expecting their peers to do the heavy lifting. The report, published by ExchangeWire in partnership with supply-side platform (SSP) OpenX, finds that sustainability is less of an issue in the world’s most populous region than it is in other leading economic markets. While surveys never provide as much insight as quantitative data, they can still provide some insight into where the industry is at. The survey found that 47% of budget in the advertising ecosystem in JAPAC is earmarked to be allocated to carbon-neutral partners over the next year. Equally, almost half of the respondents…
Lumen Technologies is bowing unceremoniously out of the content delivery network (CDN) business, rendering its legacy technology infrastructure virtually worthless. In less than a decade, a trend which has seen service providers build out their own capacity as recognition of CDNs becoming increasingly critical for video delivery, has rapidly unraveled. Lumen’s CDN business joins Verizon’s Edgecast in the graveyard of CDN businesses operated by US telcos, which have failed to match Akamai’s expansion into edge and cybersecurity services. The sale of Edgecast to Yahoo – and subsequent spin-off to form Edgio – suggests a glimmer of hope for life after Lumen for these collective CDN assets. However, given the collapse of Edgio’s share price, we think a Lumen CDN spin-off…
A central theme at the Financial Times Mining event in London last week was that of geopolitics introducing additional complexity to mineral supply markets, with the idea of parallel markets even being thrown round a few times. The topic was covered in detail during a discussion with Eramet CEO Christel Bories, IGO Chairmain Michael Nossal, Ivanhoe Mine’s SVP of Corporate Development Alex Pickard, and Syrah Resources CEO Shaun Verner. While we’d usually stay away from the political angle, it is inherently intertwined with technology provision and the development of assets globally, and so we’ll cover the immediate impacts here. Within the battery industry, demand for nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite, and rare earth elements will be impacted most heavily by geopolitical…
The past year has seen significant progress in developing accelerators to improve the performance of virtualized RAN (vRAN), offloading the most demanding tasks from the central processor to an optimized chip. However, this has raised challenges to the ideals of Open RAN, since accelerators from different semiconductor providers are incompatible with one another, and can limit the multivendor interoperability between different RAN vendors’ base stations. The news that Google Cloud, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Arm have – among others – formed the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation to deliver a standard programming model for all their accelerator designs is, therefore, important and potentially welcome for Open RAN, as well as for other demanding cloud workloads such as many AI use cases.…