Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
A passing remark has stuck with Faultline since the doors closed on the 100th NAB Show. Deep in the throngs of the North Hall inside the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center, someone described this bustling section of the show as the “money-making hall.” Companies like Blackmagic Design, Adobe, Ross Video, and LiveU basked in the resurgence of an event welcoming a 24% uplift in attendees over the previous year – hitting 65,000 registrants at the 2023 technology trade fair. And it showed. Dazzling demos from Australian camera-slinger Blackmagic, featuring real-life actors, were totally over-the-top (and for once we mean literally OTT, not OTT video). LiveU had planned to have an actual playable basketball court center stage on its stand, were…
On several occasions during Faultline’s busy briefing schedule at the 2023 NAB Show, suggestions were made that momentum in Open Caching has stalled. Others, namely Qwilt, remain firmly polarized to that idea. The suite of incomplete standards from the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) have achieved a handful of high-profile deployments, with the Verizon-Disney streaming tie-up still considered something of a flagship testbed for the technology. However, this particular trial started two years ago, and some technology vendors situated in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center are growing dubious of the Open Caching business case. Meanwhile, Qwilt – a flagbearer for pre-standard Open Caching deployments – has recently secured the signature of Spanish telco giant Telefonica for…
While content delivery vendor Broadpeak is no stranger to scaremongering about the growing risks of legacy video network infrastructure being overblown with streaming traffic, it seems that sometimes a softly, softly approach goes down better. There are some nice-to-have offerings that serve as sweeter incentives for the OTT migration. More carrot, rather than stick. Top of that list is Broadpeak.io, a SaaS platform for the manifest manipulation that is required to perform targeted advertising, which Xavier Leclercq, VP of Biz Dev, tells Faultline at NAB 2023 is the main reason that Broadpeak’s customers are turning to streaming. Sky Brazil is already deploying the technology, which can also be used for linear-style channel creation, as well as emergency alerts. Traditionally, manifest…
The US Department of Interior has issued final federal consent required for the construction of the 732-mile long TransWest Express project that will deliver 3 GW worth of wind power from Wyoming to California and a few other neighboring states. The authorization process for the $3 billion project began in 2008. RWE has partnered with Kellas Midstream in order to explore the potential for GW-scale green hydrogen production at Teesside in the northeast of the UK. The UK and Netherlands have revealed plans to build an interconnector in the North Sea that would see up to 2 GW of Dutch offshore wind capacity connected to the power grids of both countries via a giant subsea high voltage direct current power…
The move this week by the new German coalition government to ban any new oil or gas heating systems will add overnight at the very least some 1 million heat pumps sales a year across Europe from 2024. While the usual refrain of “this will cost poor people a ton of money” was heard by the opposition, the amount of subsidies available, and the rapid fall in the prices of high temperature air source heat pumps will mean that by around 2026 the price of heat pump less subsidies will begin to rival that of gas boilers, and the market will accelerate even more aggressively. Already sales in the post pandemic world are going up dramatically across Europe, doubling in…
The Las Vegas convention center played host to NAB, the titular trade show of the National Association of Broadcasters, last week. With the latest in television technology on display, a notable development over the past year has been the attempts by TV infrastructure networks to expand into providing data connectivity services. The ATSC 3.0 standard, with its consumer-facing NextGen TV brand, has been the driver of this new interest. Oft-delayed, ATSC 3.0 is now gaining some momentum in the market, but skepticism remains regarding its ability to catch-on. Still, the satellite and cable pay TV options are on the wane, and a model based on terrestrial antenna broadcasts can make some significant environmental claims about its efficiency. The US is…
The decision by five key vendors to forge common software interface standards for Open RAN begs more questions than it answers. The first question is why another Open RAN standards initiative is necessary at all. It prompts the suggestion that the standards bodies themselves are failing to do their job properly if these new interfaces are as essential as the O-RAN Alliance itself acknowledges. Alternatively, it suggests that Open RAN is still very much work in progress and remains in a fluid state, where the areas for standardization are still being identified. In either case, it appears that Open RAN is not yet mature or stable enough for deployment by operators in public macro infrastructures, even if it can be…
The wave of mergers and acquisitions that swept over European mobile operators before the pandemic has abated somewhat since, but there are still deals in the offing, notably within the Vodafone Group. There could be a new string of mergers if the European Union softens its stance on consolidation in telecoms, which has long been at odds with large operators’ strategies. There are signs that the EU will be encouraging consolidation, in a bid to accelerate investment and deployment of infrastructure in fiber and 5G. That could lead to a significant restructuring of the European market, if there are fewer restrictions on mergers between operators, particularly those that reduce mobile operators from four to three in a particular country. In…
Ericsson’s finances continue to see choppy waters. The company will have issued a huge sigh of relief for all the good that has come out of India, because it has failed in every other part of the world to make any consistent headway. The dominating theme through this quarter’s results meeting was that Ericsson had already told us about all the bad news items, with lots of “just as we forecast” or “just as we warned before” statements. It was desperately trying to play down any further harm which might come from the fact that Ericsson has lost control of its customers’ 5G roll out plans, which it undoubtedly has, outside of India. Compared to Nokia, Ericsson’s balance sheet makes…
Dish Network may grab most of the headlines these days, for its attempt to shake up the US telecoms market with its 5G Open RAN roll-out, but much of the real disruption over the past decade has come from T-Mobile USA. CEO Mike Sievert celebrated 10 years of the operator’s ‘Uncarrier’ marketing strategy in a blog last week, and behind some hyperbole, these 20-plus initiatives have indeed forced a rethink about how consumers access and pay for connectivity and content in the USA. A decade ago, TMO was the fourth largest MNO and mainly focused on prepaid and low-ARPU consumers, with a very conservative approach to its networks. Now, having acquired Sprint, with its goldmine of midband spectrum, and initiated a stream…
Five years ago this week … Nagra broke into content, announcing the launch of a broadband-based platform for the movie theater industry called myCinema – a content marketplace that could stream alternate movies and live events to the big screen. With cinemas weathered by the rise of streaming, the plan was to provide cinema chains with a new medium for attracting audiences by showing a wealth of new titles, while reducing costs. myCinema boasted an AI-based recommendations engine to suggest content to cinema chain companies, based on audience demand, as well as ticket price suggestions using predictive analytics based on local community composition and local interest in varying content genres. Launched shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing could not have…
Despite hints of interest in content distribution using the low latency SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) protocol, over the past six months, it seems that integral vendors are more confused than intrigued by the proposition. While this inertia may not surprise some of our readers, we have been looking closely for further developments since a small pair of announcements at last year’s IBC opened the doors of possibility for RIST and SRT distribution. The 2022 update to the RIST specification enabled users to create open-source DRM systems for use in a multicast distribution deployment, while Canon’s arrival in the SRT Alliance pointed towards content distribution as a use case. Speaking to Faultline at NAB 2023, Haivision’s Marketing Director, Product and Solutions,…
While the high-level ATSC 3.0 announcements left much to be desired, NAB 2023 was host to a number of significant product announcements for the NextGen TV platform. Perhaps most significant is Sinclair’s announcement that it would construct an open data distribution network, to enable broadcasters, and presumably operators, to more efficiently deliver data. This was pitched as being a supplementary IP distribution mechanism, in support of both fixed and wireless options – using the terrestrial broadcast infrastructure. Broadcasting data to end-users, via this one-to-many approach, could be much more energy and bandwidth efficient than the one-to-one approach of IP unicast. Of course, CDNs have become very well versed at offloading unicast traffic to WebRTC where possible, and other forms of…
Faultline is not a people publication, but there was a palpable hole in Harmonic’s stand during this year’s NAB Show – one shaped like Thierry Fautier, the former longstanding VP of Video Strategy at the US video processing vendor. The details of this departure are not for publication, but Harmonic plugged this hole with several announcements at the 100th anniversary event, along with overarching messages of recent successes, particularly in the SaaS-based sports streaming space. On that front, Harmonic has just launched VOS360 Ad, a standalone server-side ad insertion (SSAI) SaaS that lights up targeted addressable advertising capabilities for video streaming providers, at scale. The fully cloud-based offering is powered by Harmonic’s established manifest manipulation technology, delivering targeted ad delivery…
Despite the packed schedule at NAB 2023, we still found time to dig out some names that are fresh on the pages of Faultline. Hiding at the back of the West Hall were two relatively young streaming vendors that are planning their attack on the heavily saturated North American market with very different approaches. We saw hunger from Polish backend vendor StreamVX, which is eager to twist and turn its modular vxOS platform to fit into any crevices that come available in the market. On the other hand, Spanish streaming suite Yuvod – the more holistic vendor of the two – is in no rush to create demand for its cost-saving streaming platform when lower ARPU markets are proving highly…
Netflix’s second live-streamed event was a debacle, with the series-four reunion special for reality show Love is Blind having to pivot to an on-demand release. With details scant, a post-mortem would make for excellent reading, but speculation about the cause shows just how many possible weak links in a chain exist in live broadcasts. To this end, the traditional broadcasters at NAB have gleefully laughed at Netflix’s misfortune, able to point to their collective track record for live television broadcasts in defense. Of course, a little digging can throw up plenty of outages, usually in high-stakes sports matches, but at least there was usually an accessible linear TV backup in place. Initially, it appeared that the Love is Blind outage…
While video technology companies usually jump at the chance to pose as the leanest, meanest offering on the show floor, we noticed that a few vendors at NAB 2023 were keen to temper their clients’ demands for ultra-low latency. Despite talk of latency-crunching for specialist use cases, ‘faster is not always better’ was our main takeaway from chats with three separate providers at different points in the streaming workflow. Faultline has pointed out before that vendors are missing a trick by not aggressively competing on the latency front. Canal+’s low latency service for streaming F1, soccer and rugby is one of the few examples we have seen of speed being used as a market differentiator. When it comes to latency…
Bilstein Group, an early investor in H2 Green Steel, signed a seven-year off-take agreement for green steel worth upwards of €250 million. H2 Green Steel’s plant in Boden, Northern Sweden, will be used to manufacture the green steel. According to Rethink research data, the deal will involve between 200,000 and 300,000 tons of crude green steel. The world’s deepest offshore wind turbine has been installed as part of Scotland’s biggest offshore windfarm. SSE installed the 2,000-tonne turbine foundation at a depth of more than 58 metres as part of the £3 billion, 1 GW Seagreen offshore wind farm, which it is developing in partnership with the French oil major Total. Liebherr-Aerospace has been chosen by Airbus to develop an air…
The Battery Passport Consortium has released the first iteration of its battery passport content guidance as it looks to define reporting requirements for batteries sold in the European Union (EU). The consortium was formed in 2022 with the goal of producing a demonstrator passport and creating content and technical standards for future industry participants. Standardized reporting requirements within the bloc would enable the EU to track what raw materials are used to create batteries and where they originated from within a central ledger. This can then be used to verify a product’s eligibility for potential subsidy and the EU’s progress towards its newly introduced sourcing goals as put in place by the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA). This will also…
NTT and SES have announced a partnership, to combine NTT’s enterprise services with SES’s satellite connectivity offerings. The goal is to provide a new ‘Edge-as-a-Service’ portfolio, aimed at private 5G, edge computing, and IoT applications. Vodafone is valuing its Spanish wing at around $4 billion, according to reports from Bloomberg. Vodafone is facing significant investor pressure, and given that its rumored acquisition of MasMovil fell apart last year, Vodafone appears to have abandoned its expansionist strategy. Four US congresspeople have petitioned the US Department of Justice to reexamine the $43 billion sale of AT&T’s WarnerMedia assets to Discovery, alleging that the deal has enabled the new entity to “adopt potentially anticompetitive practices.” This includes reducing programming options for consumers, as…