Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Elemental came to London to talk about its relationship with Sky in the UK, but with the news this week that Comcast is releasing its Stream service in the US, it is pretty obvious that Elemental is behind that service, in the process becoming the transcoding platform of choice for two of the largest broadcasters in the world. Back in December, when Sky in the UK made a $4 million investment in the US software encoder specialist, it was pounds to a penny that Sky was planning to use its encoding skills, and in the process likely replacing the existing Sky relationship with Envivio. This week at an event at Sky’s West London production facility, the two jointly announced that…
German second tier cable networks Tele Columbus and Primacom have finally managed to merge after almost 8 years of looking to do so. It would be just like the Germany cartel office to interfere, the Bundeskartellamt, but failing that Germany will have a third viable cable network, partly in East Germany and partly in better off Western regions. There was a time when Faultline talked openly of the two companies as if they were the same, being both controlled by Orion cable, but shareholder disputes over valuation for a tiny minority of shareholders dogged final merger, and Orion cable went on to rename itself as Tele Columbus and sold its shareholding in Primacom. This new deal will create a company…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Big data vendor ParStream has joined the HyperCat Consortium, the body that oversees the HyperCat protocol – a silo-busting way of cataloging data so that it can be queried by other platforms or devices for use in IoT applications. Peltz Shoes is abandoning the RFID project it began in 2009, after finding that the 1% of tags that failed to read properly caused more labor than the other 99% saved – among smaller issues with tag accuracy and line labor. GE and NTT Docomo have signed an MoU to work together on industrial IoT technology. Telefonica and Jasper have partnered on an IoT platform in Brazil. Etisalat is working with Oberthur Technologies and ThingWorx to create the…
Back in 2009, retailer Peltz Shoes made the decision to label its entire product selection with RFID tags in order to increase the efficiency of its warehouse an in-store operations. On paper, it sounded like a sensible decision, but Peltz has announced it is abandoning its RFID tryst, saying that RFID has caused more work than it saved. Peltz was using the tags not just for location data, but also to provide detailed label information on its shoeboxes such as price, brand, color and size. At the time, the company envisioned the tags increasing inventory management efficiency and more importantly the inventory accuracy. But Peltz has now announced that it found the tags resulted in a high labor cost to…
Smart meter manufacturer and network operator Sensus has partnered with GE to integrate its FlexNet radio into GE’s I-210+c electricity meters. The deal will mean that GE’s meters will be able to operate over Sensus’ long-range wireless network, which currently claims some 90% population coverage in the US. The meter’s initial launch will take place this month, with general availability later this year. The meter will be available with or without remote disconnect functionality, meaning that the utility would be able to install meters that could be remotely turned off should a customer fall behind in payments – a powerful incentive for customers to pay the bill, but one that many advocacy groups find unsettling. There are other direct benefits…
WiFi security needs to be toughened up to bring the standard in line with its dramatically expanded remit, according to recommendations from an IEEE study group. The IEEE – the organization which defines the 802.11 standards on which WiFi is based – now favors the use of randomly generated addresses to improve security and privacy. Currently, each WiFi device gets its own unique MAC (media access control) address, which is not encrypted, making it easy for the identifier to be traced to its user, and the user tracked. Juan Carlos Zuniga, principal engineer at InterDigital and chair of the IEEE 802 privacy executive committee study group, explained that the shortcomings date back to WiFi’s original role – as a local…
LTE spectrum allocations are coming thick and fast as countries round the world seek to ensure they keep up in mobile and broadband services. This week has seen France kick off its 700 MHz auction process, hard on the heels of Germany; Singapore is setting aside 60 MHz of spectrum for a new entrant to boost 4G competition; while Russia has announced plans to issue more licences in the valuable 1.8 GHz band. In France, the government has approved regulator Arcep’s proposals for the auction of 700 MHz, or second digital dividend, spectrum later this year, marking the official start of the process. Bidders will need to submit their applications during the third quarter and the auction will take place…
The Wireless IoT Forum (WIoTF), first announced in April, has launched formally and announced its founding and board members – Accenture, Arkessa, BT, Cisco, Telensa and WSN. The non-profit has set itself the ambitious goal of ending the fragmentation of the nascent IoT space between different protocols, and to drive consolidation in both licensed and licence-exempt wireless platforms. Collectively, the group’s mandate is to develop a clear set of operator requirements by talking to its members, enabling it to create a use case-driven roadmap for the wider ecosystem of companies and operators in the IoT. This is the approach which was adopted by the Small Cell Forum (initially the Femto Forum) so it comes as no surprise that several of…
A year ago, Microsoft’s decision to join the AllSeen Alliance – which backs Qualcomm’s AllJoyn technology as a de facto standard for IoT device discovery and connectivity – highlighted the software giant’s growing closeness to the chip supplier, and its rising acceptance of the open source model. Since then, it has become more than just an interested bystander in AllSeen. In November it revealed that the upcoming Windows 10 would include the AllJoyn software stack. And now, it has donated its Device System Bridge (DSB) software to the AllJoyn cause and open sourced the code, signaling another win for the protocol. The DSB was released by the AllSeen Alliance this week, with the promise that it “enables interoperability with legacy…
The first discussions about bring virtualization and SDN (software-defined networking) to carrier networks revolved around the cost savings. Implementing key network functions as software applications (often open source) on commodity hardware, rather than investing in expensive, proprietary appliances, would be the way to accommodate exploding levels of data usage without breaking the bank. This was the strategy of desperation. According to John Donovan, AT&T’s senior EVP for technology and operations, the carrier’s global network experienced 100,000% growth in wireless traffic between 2007 and 2014, and such curves could not be profitably supported by adding new hardware. Instead, AT&T aims to virtualise 75% of its network, stripping down each component to its core and re-architecting it for the cloud, as he…
We’re fairly sure that the Bogeyman is an OTT service. That’s what we sense out of a new report, commissioned by Nagra and executed for it by UK consulting firm MTM, based on an online survey entitled, “Profiting from the OTT explosion: opportunities for pay TV providers” The survey took in 90 senior industry participants from cable and satellite pay TV operators Telcos, standalone premium OTT service providers, and pay TV broadcasters across 31 different countries from Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and asked them how they saw the next 3 years in OTT. That’s about 3 from each territory. A remarkable number of them see literally hundreds of stand-alone OTT services erupting around…
In August 2014, almost a year back, IHS put out a report suggesting that traditional Conditional Access had had its day and from here on in it would be a contracting market. The market would peak at $2.2 billion said IHS, this year. Faultline rounded on IHS and wrote a compelling reminder that video was emerging as a multiscreen component, and actually those revenues would be considerably higher. We also pointed out that pay TV numbers continue to grow when considered globally. A new report out this week from a company laughingly calling itself Transparency Market Research, suggests the opposite, that the 2014 market size was $2 billion near as damn-it, and this would actually more than double to $4.7…
Pirates will never go away but at least they can usually be kept in check such that their impact on revenue streams is marginal or at any rate manageable. In the TV and movie business the advent of UHD TV is raising the stakes by making pirated content easier to capture at high quality, helped by the growth in video streaming over the Internet. The latter also provides pirates with a ready avenue for content redistribution. That is already happening both for on demand and live normal HD content with pirates now monetizing illicit streams through subscriptions and advertising, earning hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The industry is responding with a variety of indicatives and collaborations and in this…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The Wireless IoT Forum has been launched by Accenture, Arkessa, BT, Cisco, Telensa and WSN. The group’s mandate is to remove fragmentation and drive consolidation around a minimal set of standards for both licensed and license-exempt wireless solutions. The Bluetooth SIG has appointed ARM, Broadcom and Plantronics to its board of directors. ABB and Philips have partnered to combine Philips Hue with ABB’s i-Jia home automation system in China. The Home Gateway Initiative will close in 2016 after the completion of its work, specifying the home gateways needed to support home wireless networks. Software Microsoft has submitted open source code to the Qualcomm-backed AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn project, called the Device System Bridge. It will allow legacy devices…
Another standards and interoperability body has stepped onto the IoT scene with the launch of the Wireless IoT Forum (WIoTF), The new non-profit aims to remove fragmentation and drive consolidation in both licensed and license-exempt wireless platforms – with founding and board members Accenture, Arkessa, BT, Cisco, Telensa, and WSN. Collectively, the group’s mandate is to develop a clear set of requirements by talking to its members, which then will help it create a use-case driven roadmap for the wider ecosystem of companies and operators in the IoT. Notably, its new CEO, William Webb, also heads up the Weightless SIG – the group guiding the development and deployment of its namesake sub-GHz ISM Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocol.…
Back in November, Microsoft revealed that the upcoming Windows 10 OS would include the AllJoyn software stack from the Qualcomm-backed AllSeen Alliance. Now, Microsoft has donated its Device System Bridge (DSB) software to the AllJoyn cause (and GitHub), and open sourced the code, signaling another creeping win for the device discovery and control protocol. The DSB was released by the AllSeen Alliance this week, with the promise that it “enables interoperability with legacy and purpose-built networks, quickly and cost-effectively bringing these devices into the AllJoyn open source software framework.” This looks like another stride ahead of its OIC-backed rival IoTivity for AllJoyn. The idea AllJoyn itself is to create a common language that is spoken by devices, so that they…
Nokia is searching for a new owner for its Here mapping division, and continues to add to the attractions for a potential buyer. This week, it published a set of specifications for integrating data from a wide range of in-car sensors via the cloud, aiming to set a standard way to address this challenge. Here – richly functional and independent of any one mobile platform – has a real chance to challenge Google and become a de facto standard to power location-aware services. This is particularly true in the automotive sector, where Android and iOS are less established than they are in smartphones, and where the carmakers are keen to build in-car service platforms which they – not the mobile…
Amazon’s personal digital assistant (PDA) Alexa has been opened up to third party developers via an SDK, as Amazon begins to open up its voice-control ecosystem. Most familiar thanks to the Echo smart home device, Alexa will begin appearing in other hardware devices thanks to Amazon opening up the platform to developers – apparently free of charge. With Amazon Web Services powering the deployment, Alexa is a way for Amazon to inject itself into user’s lives – especially necessary after its Fire smartphone flopped spectacularly. With nearly all voice-based commands and queries made in mobile going to Apple’s Siri or Google Now, and a much smaller proportion secured by Microsoft’s Cortana, there’s a significant niche that Amazon can target using…
There may be seven pillars in the house of wisdom, but Cisco is only promising six with its framework for the internet of things (IoT). The company’s power rests heavily on frameworks – on harnessing its networks and platforms to unify all the disparate elements that make up a large enterprise, a carrier system, or an entire internet. Cisco has pulled together most of its IoT-related products and services – including 15 new additions – under one roof, itself held up by the six pillars. The result, the vendor says, is the kind of structure which will enable IoT systems to scale, by allowing critical functions like data gathering, data analytics and security to be addressed in a common manner.…
Belgian operator Numericable has acquired Wolu TV, the cable operator covering much of the Brussels-Capital Region, in an €18 million deal. Wolu TV has 10,000 subscribers and supplies TV, internet, fixed and mobile telephone networks. The handover from Liberty Global held Telenet to Numericable is set to take place in 2016. FCC approval for the AT&T DirecTV merger is expected shortly, according to anonymous internal sources that say the deal will be closed within two weeks. AT&T has previously said it would agree to net neutrality concessions in order to secure the deal, saying it would follow the rules on throttling traffic – but that hasn’t stopped it receiving a $100 million fine from the FCC in the week since…