Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Europe’s 5G initiatives are coming thick and fast now, with the 3GPP poised to kick off its own next generation standards process, and key decisions looming at November’s World Radio Conference. Ericsson has announced a 5G for Europe initiative just two days after the UK’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC)- heavily backed by Ericsson arch-rival Huawei – officially opened its doors. But such efforts are still clouded by uncertainties about which new spectrum will be usable and available – many eyes are on high frequency millimeter wave bands, but technical and regulatory issues are likely to persist for several more years. Ericsson’s program brings together the usual range of academic, industry, public sector and research partners and will focus on projects…
Qualcomm unveiled its most advanced Snapdragon system-on-chip to date, and reeled off a highly conventional list of target devices – smartphones, tablets, mobile hotspots. But lower profile announcements over the past few days – in areas from medical devices to drones – reflect the US company’s urgent need to diversify its platform into areas where it can find more growth than in handsets, and perhaps preserve a headstart over its Asian rivals for longer. Of course, while Qualcomm – like arch-rivals such as MediaTek and Intel – is pursuing growth in the internet of things (IoT), for the time being, its revenues will remain firmly based around its traditional target products. And in the smartphone and tablet spaces, it still…
The US telecoms market is starting to look like a Depression-era dance marathon as immortalized in ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’ The contenders are engaged in an apparently endless whirl of grouping and regrouping, seizing new partners as smaller players fall by the wayside. AT&T and Verizon, after several years of acquisitions, seem to have reached their fighting weight for now, and the action has shifted to the cablecos, while speculation about the ultimate role of Sprint, T-Mobile and Dish continues to swirl. Behind all this, of course, is the spectre of a brand new competitor, probably Google, which might throw everyone off their step. Altice buys Cablevision, bringing France’s quad play economics to US Perhaps the dominant theme…
At the DVB Project’s IBC press conference this week, chairman Philip Laven opened proceedings by stating, “Broadcast ain’t dead,” and he proceeded to describe a scenario where they were most truly dead and buried. He said that HEVC was coming to the aid of broadcasters, perhaps he has not seen the HEVC Advance royalties? And went on to describe a phased approach to UHD, firstly HEVC 4K at 60 frames per second, and then onwards to full UHD. He maintained that delivery via broadcast was still much cheaper than OTT delivery. All he would admit to was that there were, “Many technical issues still to be resolved, before UHD phase two could be implemented.” What he really means is that…
Gracenote and Rovi compete in very similar markets, providing the metadata that populates the EPGs and UIs of operators globally. Gracenote’s IBC announcement was that it had launched DVR Extend for Live Sports, a new feature of its On Entertainment package intended for US cable and satellite operators. The feature will be able to adjust a recording schedule to ensure that a viewer doesn’t miss the closing segments of a game that has ended up in overtime. Gracenote began its push into sports back in June, when it acquired Infostrada Sports and SportsDirect to expand its data and tagging catalog outside of its music, TV and movie expertise. The previous year, Gracenote acquired What’s On India, a company based in…
Virtual Reality (VR) content is unlikely to become something that is broadcast, at least not in the next few years. Nonetheless, in the past three years, the latest coming of the format has seen it transition from something that was the domain of hardcore video gamers to something that seems destined to emerge as a mobile-led premium experience for OTT content – including sports and live music events. Of course, the content needs to be captured in order to be sent over the internet to a waiting pair of eyes, but at IBC we spotted two notable cameras that would facilitate this transfer. The first was the Neo from Jaunt, which is a rig of smaller cameras that can combine…
Could it be that for the first time in living memory, Vodafone plans to use the same video technology across most of its major home markets – in this case Kaltura. This week at IBC it revealed that the OTT company was behind the implementation of its Spanish OTT service – previously called Ono TV Online, due to be called Vodafone TV. This deal has been on the cards since February when Vodafone’s Germany cable company Kabel Deutschland used the Kaltura technology. We are already aware that its fledgling Greek subsidiary is planning to use Kaltura, but somehow Vodafone Portugal seems to be going its own route, which is odd, given that right now it has no OTT service and…
Altice has more than doubled the size of its US operation by acquiring New York’s dominant cable operation, Cablevision Systems, agreeing to pay $17.7 billion in cash. It can now add this asset to the less impressive Suddenlink, which it bought in May for $9.1 billion, and overnight it becomes the fourth largest US cable operation. However, given Cablevision’s strategic position around New York, and its direct opposition to Verizon in that territory, this becomes a viable bridgehead to build a disruptive broadband and telephony business in the US. Altice Chairman Patrick Drahi said back in July that he would look at buying out US cable companies like Cablevision and Cox and has proved true to his word. Back in…
On-Ramp Wireless, a LPWAN provider, has decided to rebrand and become Ingenu. The company is using the opportunity to launch its Machine Network – a public network based on its Random Phase Multiple Access (RPMA) technology, and converting some of its 35 currently private installations to help support the initiative. Aiming for nationwide US coverage, Ingenu has previous experience in RPMA deployments around the world. It plans on quickly expanding its coverage footprint by opening some of those private networks, as well as installing more infrastructure – which the company says can achieve the same area of coverage using ten to thirty times fewer base stations than cellular. Currently, Ingenu’s footprint covers 50,000 square-miles in the US, out of a…
After watching a particularly entertaining jazz/blues quartet warm the stage up, with a drummer who was likely still better than 99.9% of attendees even after losing a stick during a twirl, the “Smart Homes: the next level of connected living (check)” panel took to the stage. Featuring SmartThings Chief Retail Officer and SVP Business Development Brian Winter, Netatmo CEO Fred Potter, Imperial College London academic James Barlow, and Euromonitor International’s research manager Ratna Sita, the keynote discussed the challenges facing their own IoT ventures, and the wider issue surrounding the emerging market.First to the stage was Brian Winter of SmartThings, the DIY smart home platform that was acquired for some $200m by Samsung. Winter opened with a demo video that…
Following the news two weeks ago that the ULE Alliance would move to support the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn framework, we made sure to pay the two a visit at IFA. The move adds a very capable PHY layer to the AllJoyn stack, which was recently boosted by Microsoft’s decision to add the AllJoyn stack and software to Windows 10, with Microsoft also donating its Z-Wave bridge to the Alliance’s work. It looks like AllJoyn is taking the lead, with its main rival, the Open Interconnect Consortium and its IoTivity framework, only due to shortly release its spec to the public – while AllJoyn has already been deployed on some 100m devices. At the AllSeen booth, Qualcomm was on hand to…
Included in this roundup are: Devolo’s powerline and Z-Wave smart home hub; Razer’s Nabu wearables; Tado’s thermostats; Acer’s Cloud Professor educational platform; DigitalFocus on Smanos smart home, Cobra’s TPMS system for cars, Logitech Harmony devices, Thalmic Lab’s Myo armband, Fonesalesman’s Qi wireless charging furniture. Devolo powerline and Z-Wave smart home platform We went and checked out Devolo’s emerging smart home platform, a system that evolved out of Devolo’s core business of building powerline WiFi adapters – which extend WiFi access inside a home by using units that plug into adapters and use the electrical cabling for backhaul.It sounds a little mad to most consumers, but powerline is very dependable for handling the low-bandwidth data that a smart home platform will…
Quantum Dot Vision (QDV) used IFA 2015 as a platform to announce a number of wins for its Color IQ quantum dot (QD) edge-optics, and Faultline caught up with CMO John Volkmann to learn more about the LCD edge-optics and the state of the QD industry. Now claiming 7 OEMs as customers, QDV’s Color IQ edge-optic was found inside the first curved QD TV, the Hisense K7100, as well as in TCL’s H9700 – the first TV to achieve over 90% of the Rec. 2020 color space, roughly double what most LCD TVs can achieve today, and rapidly progressing towards full UHD standard compliance. There are still no commercial panels that can do full Rec. 2020, and the H9700 is…
Norwegian conditional access specialist Conax, now part of Kudelski, has revealed a platform expansion that includes additions to its Contego unified security hub – featuring UHD forensic watermarking, secure Android TV and a new product for IPTV. There is currently a host of announcements from every security firm aimed at jostling for position in the UHD content market – based on MovieLabs new security specifications, and this deal heads Conax in that direction, and the new system involves a deal with Civolution’s NexGuard UHD watermarking. “Subscriber-level watermarking is the next frontier in the prevention of illegal re-distribution of premium content, in particular movies and premium sport, which is quickly becoming a serious global threat for premium pay TV operators,” noted…
The next generation of the UK’s free-to-air Freeview platform will launch in October, with Panasonic’s new 2015 Viera TVs due to be the first devices to support the service, with compatible TVs from other manufacturers following the roll out – accompanied by a new logo and marketing campaign. The key feature of Freeview Play for most viewers is the integration of the catchup services from the UK’s terrestrial channels alongside the normal linear channel listings. This means that one set top with an internet connection, is able to push OTT catchup and live TV content to viewers – without a monthly subscription. In the EPG UI, viewers will be able to scroll back through the last seven days to find…
Sigma Designs this week has ticked virtually every box with the launch of a smart TV chip for genuine UHD TVs – something we expect to emerge as a major theme from this week’s IFA show in Berlin. Sigma is one of the few companies which continues to keep some market share from the powerful Chinese MediaTek subsidiary MStar, which has a majority of smart TV design wins. Sigma Designs launched the STV7701 and says it is already in volume delivery and it supports multiple HDR standards including Blu-ray UHD and Dolby Vision. The Ultra HD Blu-ray specification supports the addition of several types of HDR metadata, including those from Dolby, Philips, and Technicolor, but only mandates the open HDR…
While the fundamentals of unified service management are already present in the IT industry under the banner of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), the detailed integration of components and development of multiscreen OSS (Operational Support Systems) is a major challenge, not just for operators but also infrastructure vendors. Last week in the first of this three part examination of service management in the multiscreen era we identified the challenges and sifted through the principle components. This week we examine some of the strategies and roadmaps being adopted by service management vendors before wrapping up next week by considering how much more needs to be done to deliver converged service management for multiscreen entertainment. Although the broadcasting industry of course differs…
We have followed the meteoric rise of S3, an Ireland based group of companies which we first found building software stacks for video on phones in the DVB-H days calling itself Silicon and Software Systems. At the time it described itself as a chip designer, which also does embedded software. These days it has become an out and out TV technology firm, innovating in the test arena, and this week it has been acquired by consulting group Accenture for what we guess must be around $100 million. The cash paid for the deal was not revealed, but already it is becoming a bit of a powerhouse in TV tech, winning the contract to look after the code repository of RDK,…
Quantenna believes it has leveraged its lead in WiFi chipset design to open up a retail and an enterprise market for its chips. But more than anything, it’s new 8×8 MU-MIMO chip pushes its design lead in operator supplied set tops and home gateways – beyond the reach of Broadcom and Qualcomm-Atheros for the foreseeable future. It claims the device can top out at 10 Gbps throughput. Quantenna did its usual, and we think unnecessary, heavy handed marketing, coining the term Wave 3, marking out its new chip design as a step beyond the Wave 2 802.11ac devices which came out for the most part in January, with a few earlier exceptions. Quantenna for its own part already had an…
Samsung is the latest set top provider to feel the wrath of TiVo, which has filed a patent infringement suit against it in the Eastern District of Texas. It looks like the price for Samsung to get a piece of the US set top and DVR market, will be to pay the toll that TiVo has inflicted upon all the US providers. TiVo has so far had a strict practice of only suing in the US, where it knows its way around the patent law and where there are precedents which cost it dear to achieve in legal fees over the past 10 years. As it released its results for the quarter, CEO Tom Rogers dropped this bombshell, citing the…