Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Singapore’s energy strategy is defined by the city-state’s lack of space, which has seen the country pursue floating LNG infrastructure and floating solar, also considering nuclear on a floating platform or artificially expanded island. But even offshore options are obstructed by how busy the sea lanes are. That leaves power imports from other countries as the last remaining option, with a 4 GW renewable import goal by 2035. This month Singapore has signed a 400 MW renewable energy import deal from Indonesia, with Singapore’s own Vena Energy working with Shell Easter Trading, Trina Solar and Gurin Energy to develop the relevant project, with a total pipeline coming from Vena of 2 GW solar, 8 GWh battery project on the Riau…
The MV Canopée, the world’s first hybrid wind-powered cargo vessel, made its U.S. debut at Port Canaveral in September 2024. Launched in 2022, this French-flagged vessel was designed by ArianeGroup to transport Ariane 6 rocket components for the European Space Agency. Operated by Alizés, the 121-meter vessel uses both fuel and four wing sails that can rotate 360 degrees to optimize wind energy, reducing fuel consumption by up to 30%. Port Canaveral’s CEO praised the vessel’s innovative design and its role in decarbonizing maritime transport while supporting space exploration efforts. Wind-assisted propulsion in the maritime sector holds promise for reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, but it faces challenges related to perception and funding. Despite regulations pushing for decarbonization,…
A new study from Boeing has revealed that feedstock grown in Southeast Asia can fulfil around 12% of global sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) demand by 2050, but production is not the primary issue for SAF. Feedstock collection and transportation, product refining and distribution are other crucial parts of the supply chain that no one is really talking about. If companies collect feedstock for SAF, but do it in a way that actually emits more carbon than just an oil rig, what progress will the aviation sector actually have achieved? There have been other reports that looked into the global potential for such biofuels, identifying around 30 EJ (1 exajoule = 1 million terajoules) worth of annual feedstock need, of which…
Global electric vehicles through the first seven months of 2024 are expected to total 8.543 million, up 20.8%, per SNE Research. Europe’s demand is now stunted by tariffs, and Western automakers are seeing their sales decline within China – but China and other markets are still increasing their demand for EVs. Company-wise, BYD continues to occupy pole position on global electric vehicle sales, including 835,000 pure BEVs sold (it now has a 4 million NEV sales target for the year, per Morgan Stanley analyst Tim Hsiao), while Tesla is in second place with a 4.9% sales decline, including a 12.2% decline in Europe and 8.3% decline in North America. Geely Group occupies third place and Volkswagen fourth. The picture is…
M&A, IP, Patents America Movil and Telefonica are considering acquiring Chilean operator WOM after the South American MNO filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. America Movil operates under the Claro brand in Chile and Telefonica operates under Movistar. Financials US chip firm Broadcom reported a 47% rise in revenues to $13 billion in the third quarter, largely driven by contributions for VMWare, the cloud vendor Broadcom acquired last year. Without the contribution from VMware, Broadcom’s revenues were up by 4% in the quarter. After Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs in early August, the chip maker is planning even more cost cutting according to Reuters. Plans could include the proposed sale of non-core assets, such as the programmable chip…
As a vendor of IoT modules, Quectel has been among the most vociferous campaigners for RedCap and is trumpeting the diversity of the technology now that there are two versions on the table in 3GPP Release 18. The firm is moving on from promoting the technical and economic benefits of RedCap as it did in a white paper discussed by Wireless Watch in June, along with a similar exercise from another IoT module maker Fibocom. It is now targeting specific sectors it considers ripe for RedCap, notably Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), where it is already gaining some traction, and automotive, where it is emerging as more optimal than full blown 5G for V2X (Vehicle to everything) communication. The issue over…
Mario Draghi has handed in his homework – a 69-page report that seeks to address the issue of poor competitiveness in the European Union. Like most rhetoric from the EU in recent months, the report calls for regulators to allow consolidation of telco operators across national boundaries. We are yet to be convinced that this is the solution to any of Europe’s social issues. However, this time it isn’t a CEO of a European operator desperate for M&A, but former European Central Bank President, and Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Draghi. These words are likely to carry much more weight, and be more warmly received, as such. “Across different metrics, a wide gap in GDP has opened up between the…
Nokia’s tempestuous history of consolidations and divestitures has hit a new level of turbulence amid rumors that its mobile business is on the verge of acquisition by Samsung. That would represent an unwelcome follow on from Nokia’s early failure to transition from feature to smart phone, as it effectively exited the mobile device market it once dominated after the arrival of Apple’s iPhone in 2007. While Nokia was never as dominant in the mobile infrastructure business as the device business, it still became a major player with prospects enhanced after the expulsion of Huawei from some major markets in Europe and North America. Nokia was running close to Ericsson and Huawei until quite recently and even now holds almost 20%…
Five years ago this week… Elliott Management echoed what Faultline had been saying for years by imploring the beleaguered operator to sell DirecTV. The activist investor sent AT&T’s board an extensive strategic rethink in a letter slamming inept DirecTV leadership, describing a confused and erratic strategy for the video streaming business built around its $109 billion deal for Time Warner. Elliot Management was skeptical of the value creation opportunities from the vertical integration, and proposed a four-part strategy which included divestitures of DirecTV along with pieces of the wireline footprint and other assets. In 2021, AT&T spun off DirecTV as a standalone company, still 70% owned by the operator. The remaining 30% belongs to private equity firm TPG. The Nagra Insight Negotiation Agent is…
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of service provision and O&M (Operations and Management). The same can be said of the overall LLM strategy. As operators deploy 5G Standalone (SA) with more complex cores, a key question becoming more urgent is whether to build fully customized LLMs incorporating their own data and exploiting domain expertise? The alternative is to harness massive investment made by others such as OpenAI with ChatGPT, Meta with Llama, or Google with its Gemini family. In the latter case, operators can still tune the models and bring in their own data, so that approach at first sight would surely appeal to many operators, especially smaller ones lacking…
Advertising platform The Trade Desk has reportedly been secretly building its own operating system, based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), and could launch as early as the beginning of next year. This news, first reported in the Lowpass newsletter, suggests that the Demand-Side Platform (DSP) will directly be competing with mastodons like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Roku, which operate smart TV platforms, as well as more directly with TV manufacturers and their proprietary operating systems, like LG (webOS) or Samsung (Tizen). With an overly saturated TV OS market, what would push OEMs and TV brands to select The Trade Desk’s operating system over any other? There are no Trade Desk TV sets or streaming platforms, so no default…
Zixi has been a busy bee since its acquisition by private equity firm Clearhaven Partners (also an investor in Wowza) in June 2024. Among other things, the takeover promised to fund Zixi’s own complementary acquisitions to accelerate its growth in the low-latency streaming space, and while Zixi is still perusing the market for targets, it has been striking integrations as an interim growth strategy. New to the list is Techex, on paper something of a rival to Zixi, which has integrated Zixi’s flagship Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) into the Techex tx edge software gateway. This is a fitting second chapter to Faultline’s NAB coverage of the Techex story, where we suggested that the UK-based company’s growth ambitions to break the…
The future of NextGen TV is not so rosy. Broadcaster consortium Pearl TV has for the first time publicly expressed “deep concern” on the future availability of ATSC 3.0 products and TV sets. This concerns the patent suit currently rumbling away at a US Court of Appeals between LG and technology IP licensing venture Constellation Designs, where Pearl TV weighed in this week with an amicus brief fearing for the future of ATSC 3.0 products. LG’s May 2024 appeal is ongoing, after the court’s first decision led to LG dumping itself out of the Next Gen TV market. Constellation Designs was awarded nearly $1.7 million for the past infringement, and LG was ordered to pay the patent pool $6.75 for…
If partnerships and integrations between technology vendors is what it takes to inspire innovation and spur new product launches, then who are we to complain? Jimmy open a few time capsules capturing post-Covid trade shows and the broadcast zeitgeist will recite piles of press releases asserting partnerships – mostly strategic decisions between vendors huddling together to weather macroeconomic storms. Again, nothing wrong with that, except that many platonic partnerships are not what they seem, and often do not produce what they promise – cost savings for customers; assurance for shareholders; new tools for product teams. IBC 2024 could—and we say could tentatively—be different. The past week has already teased a number of intriguing partnership and integration announcements ahead of next…
Switzerland’s government has announced plans to lift the ban on the construction of new nuclear power plants, a prohibition that has been in place since January 1st, 2018. Moreover, there have been calls for the process of licensing of new nuclear to be streamlined. These two actions coupled with the geographical constraints of the Central European country led us to believe that there is room for growth of the nuclear market in the region. Currently, Switzerland relies on four nuclear reactors, which produce about one-third of its electricity. These reactors, with unlimited operating licenses, can continue functioning as long as they are deemed safe. The decision to phase out nuclear power in Switzerland was initially driven by the 2011 Fukushima…
Australia’s Solar Sunshot manufacturing support scheme has launched its first phase, with $550 million AUD ($372 million USD) committed. Almost all of this first tranche consists of the 1a category, supporting solar module, glass, and tracker production with grants and subsidies, while $37 million of it is assigned to funding studies on solar panel manufacturing. The total scale of the Sunshot scheme will be $1 billion AUD (679 million USD). For context, India’s successful (because sufficiently generous) reshoring subsidy spending involved $10 billion for 50 GW of verticalized production capacity. Australia’s market scale is going to be 5 GW soon, and everything costs more in Australia than in India or China, which means that a fully verticalized reshoring program would…
If you were a North Sea fish swimming close to the seafloor near Scotland’s Orkney Islands—some 117 feet deep—between 2018 and 2020, you may have come across a barnacle-encrusted steel pressure vessel containing an underwater datacenter concept brandishing a Microsoft logo. This formed part of the tech giant’s Project Natick initiative, which—despite apparent success—has been shipwrecked, with Microsoft cancelling all future plans for shallow-sea datacenters. This is a real shame, given that the unorthodox venture stems from the ever-present sustainability nightmare that is datacenter cooling. Using power-hungry fans to lower the temperature of steaming servers is far from ideal, but it is the most common method, despite limited efficiency. Immersion cooling products are starting to grow in popularity, which include…
Netflix is still a no-show on the Apple Vision Pro app store, but headset users may soon have access to far more disruptive capabilities. Neurotechnology start-up Synchron has for the first time showcased a user operating a Vision Pro without use of hands—trailblazing outside-the-box possibilities for third-party companies seeking to build experiences based on the extended reality (XR) headset. Typically, navigation on the spatial computing device requires hand gestures, such as pinching windows to grab and drag them, or zooming in. However, by implanting a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) in a 64-year old ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) patient, the Vision Pro could be controlled fully by thoughts, enabling a fully hands-free experience. Synchron’s test patient lost the function of his upper…
In a timely announcement, TV audience measurement firm iSpot.tv has recently revealed an integration with short-form video king TikTok, launching its Unified Measurement Platform on the social-video app. This comes as the ByteDance-owned platform is wooing advertisers, amid a summer of sports that has attracted many eyeballs, online conversations, and ad dollars with them. iSpot’s tool measures TV advertising across hundreds of streaming platforms and services as well as traditional linear networks, allowing advertisers to measure and make use of cross-media engagement. Advertisers will be able to determine their reach on TikTok through brand-level reporting, and improve media buys for connected TV and linear with the incremental reach of TikTok ads, iSpot alleges. To back arguments on the efficiency of…
Amsterdam is preparing once more to host a melting pot of products and services in the low-latency streaming department, and a perfect primer for IBC 2024—two weeks from now—is a new report claiming that Zixi’s dominance will be countered by the rise of alternative protocols. The forecast’s focus, from Faultline’s sister service Rethink TV, is on the open internet contribution protocol part of the video assembly line. It forecasts a modest market increase from a little under $2 billion in 2024, to nearly $2.6 billion in 2029, which some of the chief flagbearers in this industry might say is underwhelming, even undermining. However, the key cut of this forecast is the cloud slice – covering the three segments of initial…