Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
For the best part of two years, multicast ABR connoisseur Broadpeak has been hammering home to Faultline that the French firm holds no direct contractual agreement with sports streamer DAZN. After all, it was Italian operator TIM that chose to deploy Broadpeak’s multicast ABR technology to alleviate bandwidth bottlenecks during live soccer matches, after DAZN contentiously secured exclusive Serie A rights. We always sensed this was a temporary state of affairs, with DAZN sure to eventually recognize the benefits of cutting out the middlemen by forging a direct bridge with Broadpeak’s nanoCDN, in what is effectively a reseller deal. Just in time for IBC 2023, France-based Broadpeak can officially boast DAZN as a direct customer, taking the nanoCDN multicast ABR…
Australia’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro storage project has seen its projected cost double for the second time, now reaching $12 billion AUD ($7.65 billion USD) according to a new review. The 2 GW project was originally intended to be complete in 2021, then in time for coal closures in 2025, now the expected date is December 2029. The project’s new CEO, Dennis Barnes, cites delays with a boring machine needed to dig a 27-kilometer tunnel. The project retains the support of the government, but some commentary would see it ditched in favour of battery storage. The Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales are seeking 2.4 GWh of energy storage, likely taking the form of 600 MW 4-hour…
Bila Solar, a Singaporean company, is to build a $35 million, 1 GW solar module factory in Indianapolis. The product is to be glassless and frameless for low load-bearing roofs as well as VIPV with 19.3% efficiency. Fraunhofer ISE will advise HoloSolis on technology selection for its upcoming 5 GW cell factory to be built in France, which was previously reported as TOPCon. Jordan will provide $140 million government support for a cell factory in the country. BCCY New Power will invest $191 million in a 4 GW heterojunction cell factory in Huzhou Moganshan, Zhejiang Province, China. A $370 million, 5 GW cell factory to be built by JA Solar in Vietnam, OPES Solar Mobility, a joint venture of Chinese…
The fight between virtual and traditional MVPDs in the US has brought dubious calls of foul play against one of the most aggressive insurgents on the market – YouTube TV. US ad watchdog, the National Advertising Division (NAD), has pronounced that YouTube TV should drop its recent claim that it costs $600 less than a traditional cable package. The NAD acted following a fast-track challenge from Charter Communications, which lost 200,000 video subs in Q2 of this year. YouTube TV argued that “standalone cable” services are the basis of the comparison that led to claims of $600 in annual savings. However, this claim includes the cost of two set tops per household, which the NAD proclaimed was not a fair…
for WBD’s superhero movie. With OTT viewing rising, at the expense of traditional linear consumption, the broadcasting old guard is scrambling to survive the transition. Given the time they have had to work this problem out, a lively yet frustrated panel at Streaming Media Connect had some words of wisdom for those trying to make the shift, but not much sympathy. Titled ‘Bridging the Gap Between Broadcast and Streaming Tech,’ the moderator set the scene by saying that so many engineers in broadcasting viewed streaming and OTT as a fad, and that they’ve had so much time to adapt to this. So, he asked, why was there such hesitancy to embrace the future? Ben Ratner, Director of News Technology for…
Crypto-adjacent web3 distribution vendor Eluvio is trying to reframe its Content Fabric platform as a one-stop shop for Premium 4K VoD, with low latency live streaming and personalized ad-insertion for FAST channels. This was the sales pitch at Streaming Media Connect, highlighting a new customer – Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). Eluvio’s early publicity focused on the novel stack, and its claimed performance. To date, it has not taken the media and entertainment industry by storm, and so it is attempting to simplify the messaging. A tech blitz is useful for gaining investor interest, but the jargon is simultaneously off-putting for many customers. With WBD on board, the hope will be that the now-established platform can start turning pilots into deployments.…
Surveying the state of standardization in ad tech is the necessary conversation that no one wants to have. While achieving interoperability would promise much higher revenues across the board, taking stock of the current state of the industry always seems to circle around two points – noting how little progress has been made, and how much further we have left to go. A panel discussion at the Stream TV Advertising Summit 2023 circled around the woes of unified measurement, the end goal of which is to be able to aggregate all measurement data regardless of a user’s location, viewing device, or the reporting preferences of the measurement vendor that sourced the data. It took at least half an hour before…
Five years ago this week… Russian set top specialist SmartLabs made off with the contract for O2, the largest telco operator in the Czech Republic. O2 also ran at the time the largest cellular network in the country populated by 10.5 million people. The most ground-breaking feature of the deal was called Multidimensional TV, which allowed sports fans to view up to 6 football, hockey or tennis games on a mosaic on the screen., allowing them to select angles and commentary for each match. – Intel has terminated its agreement to acquire Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli contract manufacturer, citing the inability to obtain regulatory approval in a timely manner. The deal was signed in February 2022, for $5.4, and Intel…
China’s tech giants have all rushed to place large orders for Nvidia chips optimized for machine learning (ML) amid a flurry of activity in the AI-related semiconductor area. In another key development, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest foundry, has elaborated on plans to build a new semiconductor factory in Germany, after receiving the go-ahead to lead a joint venture both from its board and the country’s government. That TSMC factory is likely to build advanced 3nm process AI chips designed for the automotive sector, making Germany an appropriate location. China’s spate of Nvidia orders appears to have come from Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance, according to reports in the UK’s Financial Times, although with no response to requests…
Canadian computer hardware manufacturer Netint recently hosted its ‘Building Your Own Live Streaming Cloud’ symposium, aiming to cover all areas of creating a cloud server, with a notable inclination towards transcoding. Netint’s premise is that building an entire live streaming cloud system on your own would be near impossible without integrating external offerings. To build your own house, you need to acquire the materials, tools, and know-how from somewhere. Hence all the vendors, with Netint first in line, were there to sell their own slice of the cloud ecosystem pie for interested customers to choose from, all this in a series of advertisements serving as a useful DIY lesson. That is at least the impression given from the first talk…
There is an avalanche of WiFi cloud management platform announcements at the moment, with Nokia, Plume and Adtran all lifting the curtain on their respective offerings in the run up to Fiber Connect 2023 in Florida this week. All three vendors are pitching the usual increased revenues for operators, as a result of more control over the user-base and the better customer experiences that should ensue. Cloud-based WiFi management platforms are nothing new. In fact, both Plume and Nokia have both had offerings in this area for years, rendering these new announcements simply fresh licks of paint on pre-existing technology. The Adtran announcement, however, paints a company struggling to stay on top of key trends for its triple and quad-play…
A trio of live production professionals agreed that the public internet was not yet stable enough to deal with the new wave of brands exploring the potential of live and interactive video streams for marketing their businesses. Still, their best advice for ensuring a live event goes off smoothly is to stick to the basics of rehearsing and walk-throughs, and that a shiny new technology will not negate this need. Streaming Media Connect was the host for this discussion, where Corey Behnke, Co-Founder and Producer at Live X, implored the audience that “you have to actually test the failover. The bigger the show, the more you tend to be apprehensive, so it’s the mid-tier shows where you take things for…
There is a lot of hype surrounding technology deployments at the network edge, but most major video platforms are still in the early experimental phase. A discussion at this week’s Streaming Media Connect 2023 revealed that major OTT platforms – Max and Starz – are consistently experimenting with edge deployments, although the infrastructure is not yet there to make it standard practice. Taking a punt at what has always been a gray area term moderator Mark de Jong, Chairman of the CDN Alliance, defines the edge as “the closest you can get to a client while still serving it content,” noting that some judge the true edge to be the client device itself. With that agreed, the debates began. Subhrendu…
The chances that a lawsuit from TSG Entertainment Finance is the domino to fall in the collapse of the infamously greasy Hollywood accounting practice are slim, but the coincidental timing of the scandal of faked ticket sales in South Korea let both incidents shine a light on a troubled industry. Disney has yet to comment on the TSG lawsuit, which alleges that 20th Century Studios and Disney have “tried to use nearly every trick in the Hollywood Accounting playbook” to cheat TSG out of hundreds of millions of dollars that it is owed. TSG is one of many investment firms that puts up the initial capital that funds these films’ creation, in return for a cut of the profits. TSG…
The Californian state senate has provisionally passed a bill to mandate that electric vehicles (EVs) sold after 2030 will have to be vehicle to grid (V2G) compatible. While the bill has not yet been ratified into state law, it looks increasingly inevitable that the state will become the first to mandate the requirement despite automakers’ existing commercial incentive to do so. Vehicle to grid capability and the capability for bidirectional charging should be a significant selling point for consumers in regions where natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, or earthquakes threaten grid infrastructure. While this is usually covered by energy storage systems like Moss Landing in the state it can be quite expensive to deploy systems large enough dedicated towards infrequent…
The 10 GW solar manufacturing tender opened by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) continues to bear fruit, this week with a consortium announcing its plans for a fully-verticalized solar factory. The three companies involved are module maker Heckert Solar, module distributor Wattkraft, and solar glass maker Intefloat, all German, although Intefloat was acquired by India’s Borosil Renewables in 2022. Heckert Solar will have its Thuringian module factory expanded from 400 MW to 2.8 GW, while another Heckert Solar facility in Frankfurt am Oder will see 5 GW of polysilicon, wafers, and cells. Lastly, Intefloat will expand its glass production at a site in Brandenburg. If you’re wondering how a simple product like glass can compete…
African MNO MTN has agreed to sell a minority stake in its financial business to Mastercard, which values the division at some $5.2 billion. The stake acquired and amount invested by Mastercard has been kept suspiciously quiet. The wing has 60.5 million users, and processed some $135.2 billion, in the first half of the year. Foxconn has cut its full-year guidance, in its Q2 results. Net profits for the quarter fell 1%, to $1 billion, but revenues fell much more sharply – down 13.8%, to around $40.7 billion. A strategic partnership with Microsoft has been pointed to, as a highlight, which will create LEO satellite systems for automotive, smart city, and 5G communications. Zain has claimed to have built…
China’s tech giants have all rushed to place large orders for Nvidia chips optimized for machine learning (ML) amid a flurry of activity in the AI-related semiconductor area. In another key development, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest foundry, has elaborated on plans to build a new semiconductor factory in Germany, after receiving the go-ahead to lead a joint venture both from its board and the country’s government. That TSMC factory is likely to build advanced 3nm process AI chips designed for the automotive sector, making Germany an appropriate location. China’s spate of Nvidia orders appears to have come from Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance, according to reports in the UK’s Financial Times, although with no response to requests…
The departure of Tareq Amin – the visionary CTO behind Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native network and the CEO of the firm’s Symphony vendor arm – highlights the commercial failure of Japan’s new entrant MNO (so far at least) as well as the challenges facing the Open RAN market that Symphony was set up to commercialize. Amin’s departure, whatever the reasons, will be a blow to the wider Open RAN community, in which he was such a high-profile and visionary cheerleader. In reality though, leading Open RAN deployers are generally not adopting the Rakuten blueprint. Even Dish has very different architecture and vendor choices, including the decision to put its core and some RAN functions in the AWS cloud. And operators such…
RedCap (Reduced Capability) 5G has emerged from beneath the radar to become a hot topic as operators begin to see it as a driver for use cases that demand lower energy consumption than full blown 5G New Radio (NR) but still higher performance than traditional LPWAN. Growing concerns over energy consumption as well as cost have opened new horizons for RedCap even before it has been deployed much, at least according to Ericsson and Taiwanese semiconductor firm MediaTek. These two have teamed up to demonstrate 5G RedCap data and voice calls over both frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) spectrum bands, with the aim being to show that it can do everything full blown NR can do…