Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Orange subsidiary Viaccess-Orca has announced a collaboration with French peer to peer (P2P) vendor Quanteec, integrating the start-up’s technology into its video player. Planned as an IBC teaser, the press release leaves much to the imagination. To get the full picture, Faultline touched based with both players involved in this cooperation. The one-line version of this story is that VO is onboarding Quanteec’s P2P “multi-source CDN” technology into its VO Secure Player, in a proof-of-concept attempt to assess market interest in the energy-saving technology. The offering claims up to 45% in energy savings, as well as a minimum of 25% delivery cost savings, and 50x scaling, all this with no additional infrastructure deployments. Those metrics were quantified by Quanteec, and…
The evolution of video delivery infrastructure provider Edgio, from top-three CDN to stock price rock bottom, has now morphed into a different shape just in time for IBC 2023. The US vendor, which was created from the merger of Limelight Networks and Yahoo’s Edgecast in early 2022, is repositioning as a Managed Service Provider as part of a new five-piece band. In other words, Edgio is becoming more of a systems integrator. The move follows a trend of veteran TV infrastructure providers turning their expertise to systems integrator and project management type roles, to carve out supplementary revenue streams during a period of cost savings and economic uncertainty. To achieve this, Edgio needs stellar partners that together can create a…
Tracking bleeding-edge disruption in video compression is, as ever, on Faultline’s crammed agenda for IBC 2023, which opens doors tomorrow. In the run-up to the media industry trade show, claims of world-first exclusives have been brandished around that may ruffle feathers of neighboring encoding players on the show floor. A prime case of pre-IBC flexing comes from VisualOn, making a serious claim of launching the market’s first universal content-adaptive encoding (CAE) product. However, it is not clear from the announcement what makes this new CAE offering, called Optimizer, a novel and world-first exclusive. If, by first universal CAE product, VisualOn means this is the only technology that is applicable to all video use cases, it suggests other CAE offerings do…
Charter Communications and Disney have reached a compromise, ending eleven days of blackout for 14.7 million US customers of the telco’s cable service Spectrum TV—just in time for ESPN’s first Monday Night Football game of the 2023 season. Although carriage disputes are commonplace in the United States, this one was different, not only by its scale but because of Charter’s projected unwillingness to budge on a vision that could upend the nature of pay TV bundles. You can go over every small detail of the debacle on the newly dedicated Wikipedia page, but in a nutshell, Charter was unhappy to pay what it deemed to be an overpriced renewal of carriage fees to Disney, arguing that the House of the…
IP-house InterDigital, which licenses its patents in both the video and cellular world, has filed suit against device-maker Lenovo in the US, alleging the infringement of its AV1 and VP9 codec patents. Crucially, InterDigital is asserting non-standard essential patent rights, which means it does not have to abide by the usual FRAND terms. Meanwhile, we have heard rumor of a lurking new codec pool, this time focused on the cloud side of things, and not the devices. Unsurprisingly, nobody wants to stick their neck out and speak about this, but IBC 2023 is going to be an opportunity to kick up a fuss and turn over stones on this front. FRAND is the term used to describe fair, reasonable, and…
With a brimming IBC schedule, Faultline was not able to squeeze in a meeting with US edge computing and CDN supplier Fastly. Instead, we touched base with Fastly’s Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer, Lakshmi Sharma, on the eve of the trade show. Prefacing this with a notable trend in the industry, we have previously reported that Akamai, Fastly’s largest competitor, has been openly evolving into more of a cybersecurity business, making in Q1 2023 less money with its Delivery branch – the traditional server-based CDN revenues – for the first time. We expect the gap between the two sectors to significantly widen in the coming years. Sharma insists that delivery will always be a “core part” of Fastly’s offering,…
IBC is gearing up for a security shootout, with both Synamedia and Nagra firing off pre-show announcements – likely to get ahead of their rivals and boost SEO rankings. To this end, we expect a number of security announcements from the show, reflecting how the subject has shifted over the years. The current state of the art is watermarking, with the industry having accepted that pirate streams are an inevitability. It has found success in live sports, but now looks ready to expand into less premium content. Synamedia was first to announce, declaring that it was focusing its anti-piracy initiatives on its ContentArmor forensic watermarking, as well as its intelligence and consultancy services. It pointed to Hollywood studios increasingly demanding…
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has reported that in the first seven months of 2023, the country manufactured 276.6 GW of photovoltaic cells, and that all solar exports combined reached a value of $32.47 billion, while domestic installations reached 97.2 GW. These figures annualize to 474 GW, $56 billion, and 167 GW, and the actual figures will be more like 500 GW, $50 billion (most exports are in the middle of the year), and 175 GWac / 210 GWdc. China’s “whole county promotion” rooftop scheme had reached 37 GW installed as of the end of April 2023, having first been announced in June 2021. While the scheme is still going strong across the 676 municipalities which participated, this…
We recently spoke to Power Roll, a British startup which has developed proprietary microgroove architecture. This technology makes Power Roll one of the most interesting perovskite companies. Asked if anyone else would start doing the same thing, CEO Neil Spann replied, “We own microgrooves for solar, our patents are absolute because it was such a new field – we own any shape, any size, the materials on either wall and any absorber material. But everyone else is going with the dogma of the sandwich arrangement for now anyway.” Power Roll’s strategy – thin-film single-junction perovskite for distributed energy applications– is familiar from several dozen other perovskite start-ups at this point. Specifically this will mainly involve non-load-bearing rooftops and BIPV, with…
Brazil’s Vale has announced that it is committing $25-$30 billion in investment over the next decade, and that the company intends to focus on copper and nickel resources in Brazil, Canada, and Indonesia in preparation for increased material demand through the green energy transition. The company will focus on expanding its portfolio towards new nickel and copper developments in strategic locations, complying with various policies like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA). Brazilian and Canadian deposits will likely be prioritized towards the US because of Inflation Reduction Act incentives and sourcing requirements, while Indonesian resources will likely be directed towards China where it will serve the domestic market, with overflow going to…
Amdocs has launched its ‘Generative AI-powered Cloud Management Platform,’ which promises to make operator clouds much more efficient – particularly multi-cloud deployments. The key is AI-driven automation, using the amAIz generative AI. Arm has filed its IPO paperwork, looking to go public on the Nasdaq exchange. It also confirmed that SoftBank paid $16 billion for the 25% stake held by the Vision Fund investment vehicle. Arm is not listing a target price, nor how much of it is for sale, but the SoftBank acquisition implies a $64 billion market cap – a tall order for a company with flat annual revenues of $2.7 billion. Later filings showed that Arm has targeted a valuation of $50-54 billion, on the AT&T has…
Having dipped significantly in August, the Vendors segment has recovered substantially. This contrasts to the Operators, which have declined slightly in the past month, while the Indexes have also grown. As these are averages of the collective share prices, done so comparison graphs can be made in a straightforward manner, there are some notable individual performances hidden inside the aggregated score. However, it is clear that the vendors that serve the wireless segment are outperforming the operators which they supply, when it comes to share prices at least. It is worth noting that the operators proved more resilient in the dip that affected both the Indexes and the Vendors, during September and October last year. Nonetheless, the Operators are continuing…
Debates around Open RAN are as frequent and heated as ever, but this year has seen an increasing dose of realism to temper the hype. With some of the shine dulled on Rakuten’s innovative but commercially challenging venture – both as an operator and an integrator – the focus has shifted to Europe, where the ‘Gang of Five,’ large supporters of Open RAN have been working to create an ecosystem and a set of blueprints that could enable deployment by a large number of operators, not just the greenfields or the technically advanced. These five operators (Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, TIM and Vodafone) have been important in driving innovation and a modicum of scale into the platform, but even they…
Embedded SIMs have been a long time coming in smart phones and even now remain confined to the fringes, with the partial exception of the USA. Apple and to a lesser extent Google through Android have led the charge, with a major milestone coming almost exactly a year ago on September 16th, 2022, when the iPhone 14 was launched as an eSIM-only device in the USA. This has led to rapid adoption of eSIM technology there, after all the major operators had prepared the ground thoroughly by ensuring their services supported it cleanly. Elsewhere though, it is a different story, with patchy support for eSIMs and none at all in China for reasons associated with the country’s mobile payments systems,…
In the USA, the business models enabled by 4G and 5G are multiplying, along with the available spectrum bands and licensing models, attracting many new stakeholders into territory once exclusively addressed by the MNOs. Flexible licensing schemes like CBRS, and new radio technologies that can leverage or aggregate a wide range of airwaves, are all lowering barriers for new entrants, from greenfield MNOs like Dish Network to private network operators. This is creating battles as well as opportunities, as spectrum users worry about interference or congestion, and the various stakeholders try to increase their wireless assets. The latest conflicts have arisen over T-Mobile USA’s 800 MHz spectrum holdings, which are being eyed by Dish and also by private network providers.…
Five years ago this week… Faultline’s IBC 2018 post-mortem featured a study of the newly emerged video IP offspring of three big equipment suppliers Cisco, Ericsson and Nokia – birthing Synamedia, MediaKind and Velocix. Faultline saw Velocix as less of a services business than the other two, positioned more as a software license arm, relying on Nokia to be the implementation partner. Times have since changed, with Nokia recently revealing its surprise return to the CDN game. Synamedia, on the other hand, was promising to break new ground with large operator customers, such as China Central Television, which had representatives present in force to meet with the vendor’s leadership. Comcast could sell its 33% stake in Hulu as soon as…
Switzerland-based TV software outfit iWedia has announced a partnership with Taiwanese chipmaker Realtek, to enable the creation of ATSC 3.0 supported set tops, claiming the team up will accelerate the sluggish adoption of the NextGen TV standard. The cooperation revolves around Realtek‘s RTD1319D UHD System on a chip (SoC) set top processor, which runs Irdeto hybrid middleware to support both Android TV and RDK. Demonstrated last year at IBC 2022, it supports the AV1 and VVC codecs as well as 4K, HDR and 3D audio. Faultline is not currently aware of any set tops on the market using Realtek silicon. Android TV devices are dominated by Amlogic processors, while honorable mentions go to Mediatek, HiSilicon and Broadcom. On the ATSC…
We somehow missed The Kudelski Group’s first half 2023 results published a fortnight ago. It was another rollercoaster six months for the Swiss security specialist – traversing steep inclines in segments including IoT and Cybersecurity, to offset another sharp plummet from the Digital TV carriage. If an impressionable newbie to the industry were to take a shot in the dark at the state of the Kudelski affairs purely from a video business standpoint, they would digest the last six months of customer press releases and crown H1 2023 a resounding success. After all, its Nagra business unit has successfully won recent contract extensions with majors including Tele Columbus, BeIN Sports, Zee5, Telefonica, Canal+ Telecom, e.TV Openview in South Africa, and…
As growing numbers of consumers set their apps and devices to dark mode, for easy-on-the-eyes aesthetics, it is becoming more apparent the slick design may help devices expend less energy. That is at least what green-hearted Swedish app developer Accedo is claiming in a whitepaper testing devices, applications and user interface settings, released last week just as Faultline was looking into the energy usage of set tops over time. This week, we delve into the key findings of the study, part of which is the confirmation that Smart TVs and current set tops are not as energy guzzling as they once were. Before we go there, however, Accedo tried to see if some streaming apps are more energy consuming…
Faultline does not make a habit of looking too much into carriage disputes. Blackouts happen all the time, and no matter their size, they represent just another day in the US broadcast market. Sure, the disruptive impact on consumers can be huge, but carriage agreements between content providers and pay TV operators are almost always renewed eventually, and therefore the disruption tends to be temporary. That is until one of these days a blackout goes too far. This is the case with the Charter Communications versus Disney confrontation, from which consequences could catalyze a fundamental change in the nature of pay TV bundles. First, a quick recap of events. On August 31, Charter removed all Disney-owned channels from its distribution…