Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Helium has announced a new $5 unlimited mobile package in Miami, Florida, on the back of its crypto-LPWAN network. The ‘decentralized wireless’ approach, abbreviated as the awful term ‘DeWi,’ relies on third-parties to deploy the network equipment, and teases a view of a future where the macro approach from the major equipment vendors has been replaced by something much more holistic. Of course, these are likely a pipe dream, but Helium has proven critics wrong in the past. It began as a rival unlicensed spectrum LPWAN play, which sold gateways that housed its proprietary protocol. These gateways would use a cryptocurrency process to pay people who installed them, and allowed them to piggyback on a broadband connection. The approach proved…
Japan’s SoftBank has often played a poor hand as a global technology conglomerate, even if has become a significant force in Open RAN and vRAN development with a lead role in various collaborations. The company is all the more determined to succeed with its biggest card of all, the Cambridge, UK, based semiconductor design company Arm, in which it currently holds a controlling 75% stake. SoftBank wants to cash in some of its stake in Arm, and raise the value of the rest, to recoup some of the money that has been lost through its rather ill-fated Vision Funds – which were set up as a vehicle for major investors in high technology companies, drawing in Saudi Arabia’s public investment…
With the World Radio Conference (WRC) looming this autumn, spectrum decisions in major mobile markets assume particular significance. The agenda and stakeholder lobbying positions for WRC may be almost finalized, but real-world regulatory changes can still have a strong influence on discussions and outcomes. The regulators in the USA and Canada have been active over the summer lull. In the USA, debates over contended bands such as 12 GHz and 3.3 GHz, as well as the upper 6 GHz band, continue to rumble, with many parties advocating spectrum sharing schemes, similar to the USA’s three-tiered CBRS regime, to maximize usage of the airwaves and end disputes between radio, satellite, government and other interested parties. And the challenger MNO, Dish Network,…
Type in “Nielsen measurement mistake” in any search engine, and you will find a plethora of stories about some of its major mishaps practically every year. It’s almost as if the audience measurement mastodon is the video industry’s version of the “Florida man”. Those faux pas are well-documented by Faultline, and we will revisit some of these further down. In the meantime, a new partnership announcement on the AVoD side implies a trend that – while Nielsen may not be fully redeemed – its recovery may not be going as badly as some think. It come as Nielsen has gained its first European publisher collaborator for its Identity System, the French TV network giant Groupe M6. Funnily enough, but probably…
There was a time in recent memory where the BBC was considered the crème de la crème of video technology stack development, with an R&D department boasting an illustrious career not only as a traditional broadcaster, but as an early OTT video pioneer. BBC iPlayer was one of the world’s first online catch-up TV platforms, dreamt up in 2005 and delivered in 2007. However, with defunding of the UK public broadcaster now in full swing, seeking some $600 million in annual cost savings, the BBC’s legacy as a traditional broadcaster turned streaming trailblazer is at risk. But the Beeb likes a challenge. In a series of updates, the BBC has reminded the video industry that this giant is not sleeping,…
Chinese internet behemoth Alibaba is often left out of hyperscaler conversations – unfairly cast aside by the US-centric cloud computing triopoly of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Being results season, Faultline has taken a look at the latest earnings from all four of these cloud computing colossi. In Alibaba’s latest earnings report, the company has highlighted an important trend. The Alibaba Cloud division has just reported effectively flat year on year growth of just 4% in the second quarter of 2023. However, EBITDA for the same business, same product, same technology, somehow spiked by 106% in the same period. CEO Daniel Zhang felt it necessary to explain the phenomenon to investors on the Q2 earnings call. The slowdown in…
Video contribution giant Zixi has announced a customer win, with US network Fox signing up to the Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) – ousting an old Harmonic installation, Zixi’s CEO Gordon Brooks tells Faultline. Fox will use Zixi for the initial delivery of 190 affiliate’s local channels to its OTT distribution partners – the Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs). Harmonic has not responded to our inquiries, but this is another notch for Zixi. Briefing us on the deal, Brooks said, “We do this globally for many networks and content providers. When looking at implementations like Fox, the 190 affiliates with main and backup workflows, with monitoring and distribution, translates to over 4,000 streams. There is virtually no other way to implement…
Fixed networks use less energy than mobile networks when streaming video, according to a new assessment of digital services from the European Commission (EC), while data shows that networks are not nearly as energy-intensive as many perceive them. Faultline does not usually give credence to napkin math power consumption figures or guesstimated comparisons between the video streaming industry and other gas-guzzling markets like aviation and white goods. However, this 150-page report from the EC, scribed together with consultancy outfit Ramboll and sustainable software firm resilio, looks pretty thorough. The basis is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach – cited as a time-consuming and data-intensive model – factoring in three tiers to its calculations. These are user environment, network, and data…
Liberty Global has effectively paid a third-party to take the Horizon video platform off its hands, in a deal wrapped up as a multi-year collaboration with consulting business Infosys. The deal to outsource set top software development is designed to shave $110 million from Liberty Global’s annual run-rate – by allowing artificial intelligence to decide Horizon’s future. Infosys will receive approximately $1.64 billion over the five-year contract – $330 million a year – to take on build and operations of the Horizon technology. There is even the possibility of extending the deal to 8 years, swelling the contract value to $2.5 billion. So, at a potential cost to Liberty Global of $500 million a year, just to save $100 million…
Nutrien has paused its $2 billion blue ammonia plant in Geismar, Louisiana, due to rising costs. The facility was set to be the world’s largest clean ammonia facility, once built in 2024. Rising costs of 15-20% during the design phase led to the suspension. The project’s delay is expected to be at least 24 months, and Nutrien’s profits have also been affected by falling fertilizer prices and reduced potash sales.Top of Form OX2‘s Triton offshore wind farm, located off Sweden‘s southern coast, has secured a Natura 2000 permit. The County Administrative Board’s endorsement for a permit according to Sweden’s Exclusive Economic Zone Act paves the way for construction, projected to begin by 2027 and operation by 2030. The 1.5 GW…
The Japanese government is considering selling its one-third stake in NTT, in order to fund increased spending on defense. A spokesperson for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party floated the plans on TV, as a way to avoid raising taxes. UScellular’s owners, Telephone and Data Systems and the United States Cellular Corporation, are exploring sales option for the firm. Options include bringing an additional partner in, according to a somewhat vague press release. The CEO of Rakuten Mobile and its network services wing Rakuten Symphony, Tareq Amin, has stepped down immediately for personal reasons. Rakuten Group CEO Mickey Mikitiani will be heading Symphony, for the moment, while Sharad Sriwastawa will move from CTO at Mobile to CEO. Heliot Europe says it…
Renesas is acquiring Sequans, in a semiconductor tie-up that will see Sequans and its low-power cellular expertise join Renesas in an expansionist move. The deal is worth $249 million, and is expected to be complete by Q1 2024. This is the latest in a spree for Renesas, which has acquired Dialog, Celeno, and Panthronics in the past few years, to expand its IoT offerings. The deal will see Renesas move from the local-area network game into the wide-area network world. Previously, it has dealt in WiFi and Bluetooth, but it has worked with Sequans since 2020. Renesas cites an expected 10% annual growth in the market for cellular IoT devices, as a motivation for the deal. Sequans will become a…
Samsung and Intel have announced the expansion of their long-running RAN partnership, using new native silicon functions to provide better performance in virtualized radio access network (vRAN) deployments, using Samsung’s vRAN 3.0 software. Specifically, the news sees Samsung using Intel’s new 4th generation Xeon Scalable CPUs. The chips feature the vRAN Boost tooling, which the pair says provides significant performance gains for virtualized RAN deployments. They have been working together in this sector since 2017, and Samsung has won vRAN deployments with Dish Network, Vodafone, and KDDI – coyly described as tier-one operators in the US, UK, and Japan. In an earlier MWC announcement, Samsung talked of a North American deployment it was expecting to be the first deployment for…
UScellular and Ericsson have extended their private 5G partnership with plans to target the industrial sector, ports, hospitals, utilities and airports. The joint package combines UScellular’s connectivity services with Ericsson’s private 5G network portfolio, which itself is built on a combination of underlying 4G, 5G radio and dual-mode core technology developed specifically for enterprise operations. Under the deepened partnership, the duo now offers enterprise customers a single point of contact for all system installations and subsequent life cycle management. “We are seeing strong momentum for private networks driven by use cases that greatly benefit from 5G connectivity,” said David Green, VP and key account manager for the UScellular account, for Ericsson North America. As a regional operator whose network is confined largely to…
Five years ago this week… US film producer and almost-billionaire Jeffrey Katzenberg secured more than $1 billion in funding for a short-form, mobile-first streaming service to be called NewTV. The platform was later renamed Quibi, the short-lived “dumbest thing to ever cost a billion dollars”, in the words of Jimmy Kimmel. It launched in 2020 and lasted only 6 months. Faultline had seen the writing on the wall from the beginning. Disney+ ended Q2 2023 with 105.7 million paid subscribers globally, a practically flat 1% growth from the previous quarter. Q2 was bad news for the Indian streaming business, Disney+ Hotstar, which saw its subscriber base churn out 12.5 million subscribers – a quarter of its entire base…
Avid Technology, the non-linear editing software company, is being sold to private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG) for $1.4 billion – a 3.2x premium on Avid’s year-to-date revenue of $428.2 million. Rumors have been circulating since May this year of a possible sale of the editing giant to private equity, and the transaction is expected to close in Q4 this year. Confirmation of the purchase coincided with Avid’s second quarter 2023 earnings release. Revenue increased 11.1% year on year to $108.5 million, of which subscription revenue accounted for $44.4 million, up 30.2% thanks to a net increase of 17,700 active paid software subscriptions in the quarter. Avid ended Q2 with approximately 544,400 total subscriptions to paid cloud-enabled software. As…
Dish Network’s subscriber numbers are in free fall across the board, but it is clear that the company is determined to make it in the wireless sector. It comes as the US satellite TV operator has announced it is re-merging with satellite infrastructure provider EchoStar, 15 years after they first split, in order to provide some much-needed cash flow to feed Dish Network’s burgeoning 5G network. The two entities are far from equal partners when it comes to the balance sheet. Dish is turning away from its plunging satellite TV business by heavily investing in a nationwide mobile network infrastructure, generating $22 billion of debt for the company. Meanwhile, EchoStar is essentially debt-free, with cash of $1.7 billion at the end…
A marriage in low-latency royalty sees Red5 Pro onboard Zixi’s revered software-defined video platform (SDVP) for sub .5-second streaming latency. But with Red5 Pro specializing in streaming based on the WebRTC (real-time communications) protocol, and Zixi considered a rival-of-sorts as a protocol in its own right, there are some creases in this deal that need ironing out. Both Zixi and WebRTC are based on UDP (User Datagram Protocol). Both are relatively modern streaming protocols. Both use Forward Error Correction (FEC). But that is about where the similarities end. WebRTC is a free and open source protocol to use, while Zixi is a walled garden protocol requiring a paid license. Despite the proprietary nature of Zixi, the protocol has proven immensely…
Paris-based personalized recommendations provider Spideo still walks the walk of a nimble start-up, waiting for the opportune moment to strike veterans like ThinkAnalytics. This is despite Spideo being relatively well-established itself, founded back in 2010 – fifteen years the junior of its larger rival – on the premise of semantics being the lifeblood of future personalized viewing experiences. Spideo can afford this start-up façade for several reasons. First, the vendor’s leadership are firm believers in the personalization marketplace being far from mature, rooted in an early generation of the technology, ahead of a more profound AI-led revolution in recommendations. Spideo is therefore positioning itself as an early disruptor in the future of algorithms trained to deliver content recommendations, advertising, and…
This week, Siemens Energy signaled a €2.2 billion write down at its wind turbine division, citing failed bearings and supply chain issues, as it revealed a loss of €2.9 billion and forecast a net loss of €4.5 billion for the full year. The share price at Siemens Energy has been falling for the best part of 6 weeks as news began to slip out about just how large a problem it has at its Siemens Gamesa wind turbine operation and at the tail end of June, ex-parent Siemens shifted Siemens Energy stock into its pension fund, to avoid the bad news infecting its own share price. Siemens still holds 25.1% of Siemens Energy. The share price of Siemens Energy fell…