Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Despite much digging, Faultline failed to find an anecdote for an operator concerned about the fair contribution/fair share debate at IBC 2023. On the one hand, it confirms our most cynical suspicions about the validity of their complaints, and on the other, suggests that the vendor community is well-placed to provide bandwidth saving tools if push comes to shove. Still, CDN-centric announcements were thin on the ground at the Amsterdam trade show. The general industry consensus is that the pure-play public CDNs, the likes of Akamai and Fastly, are well on their way to expanding out of that core market – and into value-add services. This, in time, should leave a void for smaller vendors to fill, with operators increasingly…
US semiconductor behemoth Broadcom has registered a historic patent infringement win against Netflix in Germany – in a ruling that threatens to limit the SVoD platform’s offering in the country. A Munich court has ruled that Netflix has fallen foul of a Broadcom patent related to HEVC/H.265 video coding – with the court issuing an immediate cease-and-desist injunction against the streamer. In many ways, Broadcom’s victory is bittersweet, delivering another blow to the already wheezing roll-out of Ultra HD content; itself a continuation of the mess that is the HEVC patent pool structure. It also raises – or rather debunks – questions around future licensing fees for HEVC. Netflix will have to pay up, or stop streaming UHD content in…
It was a common talking point at IBC 2023 that the cost of living was not confined to consumers – that cloud computing bills are making many customers regret their technology roadmap strategies. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to publicly state the sort of numbers they are seeing, but a step-change moment has arrived – where both vendors and customers are re-examining whether the cloud is as good a salve as was initially promised. Another point of contention at this year’s IBC is whether the cloud infrastructure providers, namely AWS, Google, and Microsoft, will expand up the stack – from the underlying tools to the value-add services that so many of these vendors use them to provide. Generally, the vendors believe…
South Australia has previously reached 100% renewable grid power, and 100% grid solar power – now it has reached 100% just from rooftop solar alone, as of 23rd September. The state grid has significant powers to shut down residential solar when there’s excess power on the grid, but the need to do this will be lessened when a second transmission link to New South Wales is completed in the next few years. Ojing Technology has announced that its 28-inch Czochralski crucible offering has entered mass production and that it has completed R&D for an upcoming 32-inch crucible product. These are used to process polysilicon feedstock into monosilicon ingots. With 113 GWac added in the first eight months of 2023, China…
Dolby’s licensing arm Via LA, which recently acquired the MPEG LA program, has now exited the Alium Open RAN patent pool partnership, leaving Unified Patents to administer the former joint venture. Juniper Research says that 5G satellite services will generate $17 billion in revenue between 2024 and 2030, and urges MNOs to sign partnerships with satellite operators. Vodafone Idea has had to publicly state that it is not being acquired by a mysterious US ‘giant.’ Amazon, SpaceX, and Verizon were cited in an Indian media report. BMW has become a licensee to the Avanci 5G connected vehicle patent pool, adding its Mini and Rolls Royce brands to the pool. Avanci claims its 4G pool has some 130 million compliant vehicles…
Two neutral host services over CBRS spectrum in the USA have been launched inside a week, underlining growing momentum behind the model more widely. It is being driven by the need for more reliable indoor coverage in public venues such as hospitals, as well as internal connectivity for enterprises. Both are just for 4G LTE at present, but are pitched slightly differently. One from InfiniG, which specializes in indoor telco infrastructure, is focusing on indoor coverage for enterprises through Neutral Host as a Service (NHaaS). The company cites a potential market in the USA spanning over 40 billion square feet (4 billion square meters) of previously unserved commercial space, including office spaces, hospitality, healthcare, higher education and industrial. The other…
After more than three years at loggerheads, Netflix and SK Telecom have reached a landmark agreement – bringing to a head a dispute over liability for network fees and streaming service quality that has fueled calls for fundamental changes to how video is delivered over the internet. The ramifications for both the fixed-line and wireless ISPs have yet to be felt, but are certainly far-reaching. Known as the ‘fair share’ debate, the impasse has ended in unusual – yet strangely familiar – circumstances. An accord has been struck between the US streaming heavyweight and the South Korean operator in which Netflix subscriptions will be bundled into SK Group offerings – SK Telecom for mobile telephony, and SK Broadband for fixed…
Last week saw TM Forum staging its annual conference, Digital Transformation World (DTW), in Copenhagen, and this continued some of the important themes that we saw at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, related to the increasingly open and software-defined nature of managing telecoms networks. A key focus was on new support for the Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA), which aims to set out a framework that can simplify the operator’s progression towards cloud-native, fully automated networks, that in turn will support a host of agile new services. Big names such as Telstra and Orange lent new or expanded support to the initiative, which does appear to be gaining some real-world momentum beyond the white papers and conference sessions.…
Five years ago this week… Chinese OTT service iQiyi made history by partnering with local TV cable network Beijing Gehua CATV Network (BCGTV), marking China’s first collaboration between internet and cable TV, and a major step forward in voice-powered viewing. The two rolled out an AI-integrated TV box with enhanced voice recognition and search capabilities called the Gehua Little Fruit set top, powered by Version 3.0 of iQiyi parent company Baidu’s DuerOS. Faultline saw this as positive news for Chinese homegrown internet companies. IBC 2023 attracted a little over 43,000 attendees, a 16% increase on last year’s event at the Amsterdam RAI. However, this is still down more than 23% from the 56,000 visitors at IBC 2019, the…
While IBC 2023 was opening its doors in Amsterdam, Amazon was breaking streaming records in the US. With sports streaming increasingly top of mind for video technology vendors, many now showcasing sports-focused SaaS and cloud-based product evolutions, the new streaming milestone for Amazon’s Prime Video is significant in its scale. Prime Video produced a personal best for a live audience during last week’s Thursday Night Football streaming showcase, averaging 15.1 million viewers across all digital and linear platforms, a 16% increase over last year’s viewing numbers, according to Nielsen data. This is Amazon’s second season streaming Thursday Night Football, after paying approximately $1 billion for exclusive (or not, as we discuss) rights until 2032. More substantial still is Amazon’s claim…
One particular company active in generative AI hype caught Faultline’s eye before IBC opened its doors, and arriving at the industry event we were able to judge first-hand whether French media asset manager Newsbridge is really breaking new ground. At the conference, Newsbridge was fully launching its MXT-1 generative and multimodal artificial intelligence technology (in beta since NAB) that “gives eyes to a large language model (LLM),” Newsbridge’s CEO Philippe Petitpont explained. Contrary to text, videos are not searchable by an LLM; their content cannot be indexed. That creates somewhat of an issue in locating relevant clips in the large libraries of video content some organizations have. In Newsbridge’s case—like its name suggests—this applies notably to video news media companies.…
Non-profit members group Greening of Streaming (GoS) laid out at IBC 2023 the results of its Belgian brainstorming – from its own event held in Brussels three months earlier in an open discussion on the group’s four LESS (Low Energy Sustainable Streaming) Accord projects. These engineering working groups are now (almost) finalized and ready for testing. These will not be new to frequent readers of Faultline, as we narrated our fly-on-the-wall coverage of industry discussions and debates of the projects back in June. With the exception of Project 1, which we will detail down below, there are few changes to note from the previous GoS session. “Not much has happened over the summer break”, one of the speakers confides in…
One of the new entrants to IBC this year was Zeasn Technology, the Singaporean smart home vendor unmentioned in Faultline prior to its recent acquisition of German connected TV OS vendor Foxxum and its sister AVoD and FAST service rlaxx TV. Former Foxxum and rlaxx TV CEO Ronny Lutzi—now wearing a Zeasn EMEA President hat— sat down with Faultline at the trade show, joined by Dirk Wittenborg, Chairman of Mission 1 Joint Venture Alliance (M1 JVA), a new revenue sharing scheme from Foxxum OS 4 which serves as an umbrella organization overseeing whale OS. Lutzi narrates that the union of the two competitors will help the new unit in winning the battle for the living room, “the most valuable…
It was expected that generative AI (genAI) would hang in the air at IBC 2023. Fortunately, it was not a thick smog. There were more than a few remarks from vendors about how they resented having to dance to the tune of the latest trend, kitting out their offerings with a few artificially generated bells and whistles just to generate extra footfall. This was certainly the case at the ContentWise stand, where Renato Bonomini, VP of Sales Engineering, cut a figure of someone sick to the bone of being asked about the company’s genAI abilities. Nevertheless, Bonomini boasts that the content recommendations vendor first employed genAI years ago for a client in the fashion industry, extracting key descriptors for the…
We are witnessing history. After more than three years at loggerheads, Netflix and SK Telecom have reached a landmark agreement – bringing to a head a dispute over liability for network fees and streaming service quality that has fueled calls for fundamental changes to how video is delivered over the internet. Known as the fair share debate, the impasse has ended in unusual – yet strangely familiar – circumstances. An accord has been struck between the US streaming heavyweight and the South Korean operator in which Netflix subscriptions will be bundled into SK Group offerings – SK Telecom for mobile telephony, and SK Broadband for fixed internet and IPTV. The official announcement reads like a traditional streaming-operator onboarding deal, with…
With Apple rocking the AV1 boat in the run up to IBC, the question of video codecs was at the forefront of Faultline’s coverage concerns. One of the most important firms in the sector, V-Nova, was keen to demonstrate the progress it had made in the past year, with major silicon support wins, but there were some points of clarification that Guido Meardi, CEO and Co-founder of V-Nova, wanted to get out of the way immediately. Recent mention of Dolby’s patent interest in LCEVC ruffled some feathers, but CEO Meardi was quick to stress that this was just the initial declaration. “Our understanding is that Dolby doesn’t have patents, as you don’t need the patent to declare. The patent declaration…
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), subsidiary of the Tata group and India’s biggest IT services firm, is on the verge of entering the US market for 5G RAN equipment, with an eye on other countries as well. This could prove to be the first major success for the country’s Make in India campaign designed to build on a strong local domestic base to attack foreign markets. This after all has worked before for other major economies, notably the USA, Japan and most recently China, as well as to some extent Germany in Europe. As India’s second largest company in its own right by market capitalization, worth around $160 billion and with 600,000 employees, TCS is also drawing on its established export…
The thrills and spills of disaggregation dominated a recent telco event in London, dedicated largely to Open RAN as the presumptive future of mobile networks. We enjoyed the posturing by various parties, including UK regulator Ofcom, whose principal Simon Burley mused enigmatically that network disaggregation will bring whatever operators want to achieve from their networks. Japan’s NTT Docomo seized the opportunity to portray itself as the friend of operators in other countries, with which it was not in direct competition, on the grounds that it has already shown how Open RAN could succeed commercially. Possibly Rakuten would claim the mantle of Open RAN pioneer, having deployed the technology from the outset in a greenfield, but Docomo, along with the country’s…
Operators in various parts of Asia are trialing advanced 5G services using the upper 6 GHz band, but only 100 MHz of this spectrum will be made available for 5G in the region, even though the largest regional economy, China, has earmarked the whole 6 GHz band for cellular. The GSMA, ahead of this year’s World Radio Conference (WRC) in Dubai, is calling for a bigger cellular allocation in a band that is widely perceived, especially in western regions, to be primarily the territory of WiFi. The USA led the way in allocating the lower 6 GHz band (5925-6425 MHz) to WiFi, and the WiFi 6 standard was extended to support tri-band operations in 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6…
Five years ago this week… Comcast won the bidding war for Sky, paying $15.3 billion for Fox’s 39% share in the European pay TV operator in an auction against Disney, which had recently beaten the US cableco in a bidding war for Fox itself. Earlier that week, some analysts had suggested Comcast would trade its 30% stake in Disney-owned SVoD giant Hulu in exchange for Sky, an idea Faultline laughed out of the room. Recently, Comcast has announced it will move up its talks to sell its stake in Hulu to Disney to the end of September 2023, as Comcast CEO Brian Roberts claims the SVoD is worth well more than $30 billion. App developer Accedo is teaming with compression…