Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
While WiFi and cellular seem destined to coexist and eventually converge, there are some instances meanwhile where they will face off as direct alternatives, such as construction sites and also venues, where one or the other will serve primary connectivity. In terms of timescales, the move from 5G Non-Standalone to Standalone, the evolution of private 5G and network slicing, and the adoption of WiFi 6E and shortly WiFi 7, mean that this area is one that could get messy. Some vendors, such as Qualcomm at the silicon level and HPE at the system level, cover both bases, but Cisco is notable for leaning towards WiFi – having missed out on the cellular radio boom that came in with 4G, as…
Tier 1 telcos have struggled to ignite much enthusiasm for the mobile edge network, despite the obvious potential for applications that require ultra-low latency or that generate huge amounts of data most economically stored and processed locally. One problem is that most of the proposed applications have not been deployed yet, making the mobile edge look like a solution chasing a problem that may not exist, or that at any rate has not yet become pressing. Vodafone is one of the most active operators with a mobile edge program. It has been unfolding over the last few years through various partnerships and initiatives, with AWS Wavelength playing a crucial role as the source of edge compute, and storage capabilities inside…
Maryland USA’s optical specialist Ciena this week launched a new disaggregated router product, called WaveRouter, which it claims is the first purpose-built router offering for converged metro. This will take the $3.6 billion company head-to-head with giants like Cisco, Juniper, Nokia and Huawei. The move allows Ciena to push the product like a switching fabric, and use it as a building block to huge metro scale. Consumers have been shifting to applications which use more bandwidth such as cloud-based services, streaming video and online gaming, which this will help accommodate. WaveRouter combines IP and optical coordination, has open API-based automation, and offers redundant power and cooling, along with the ability to independently scale up compute and switching fabric. Ciena says…
Virgin Media O2, the joint venture of European cable giant Liberty Global and Telefonica’s UK operations, has announced that it has selected network equipment vendor Mavenir, to supply its Open RAN gear. This appears to be an exclusive deal, and a chance for Mavenir to prove the concrete return on investment for customers. Mavenir will act as the primary integrator, and will specifically be providing its Open virtualized Radio Access Network (Open vRAN) portfolio. Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) says it has selected Mavenir to enable a more flexible and cloud-native architecture. To this end, Mavenir says its Open vRAN suite has been designed to be cloud-native, leveraging containerized microservices that can be deployed easily on any cloud platform. Specifically, Mavenir’s…
In years when the ITU stages a World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC), there is always particular focus on thorny issues of spectrum allocation, as stakeholders lobby support for their views in advance of the event in Dubai, starting on November 20. One of the most contentious issues for delegates of WRC-23 to discuss will be the 6 GHz band, which is the focus of an intensifying stand-off between mobile operators and IT giants calling for unlicensed usage, mainly for WiFi. The two largest mobile economies have already taken opposing stances, with the USA opening up a large swathe of the 6 GHz band to support WiFi (the WiFi 6E standard), with China reserving 6 GHz for licensed 5G. Now the third…
Five years ago this week… Weeks after launching AV1, AOMedia revealed to Faultline that it was on the ultra-defensive, setting up a World Council and Legal Defense Fund to prepare for sticky situations which might arise from the plethora of patented IP within the alliance. The royalty-free licensing group had drafted in legal and engineering experts to assess AV1 processing conducted independently by member companies (Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Cisco). The plan was that every member of the alliance would have to sign a patent agreement before joining, applying the same policy as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), but companies would not have to be an AOMedia member to license the technology. — Qwilt and Cisco…
Convergence might seem right back on the agenda for major telcos now that the long-awaited merger of Canada’s Rogers Communications with cable operator Shaw Communications has been approved at last. As further evidence for this view, Orange has been cleared to acquire two Belgian cablecos and increase its fixed/mobile capabilities in that market, mirroring similar moves by the French operator in several of its other European territories. Certainly, the past decade has seen mobile-only operators racing to build or acquire fixed-line assets, as the commercial challenges of being too mobile-centric intensified. Vodafone, highly valued at the turn of the century because it was not bogged down by legacy fixed-line burdens, later found that it lacked the scale and range of…
Never one to shy away from regulatory difficulties, Meta has just embarked on its latest controversial venture – introducing generative AI to its ads business. The proposed technology, set to go live by the end of the year, will create sets of image-based ads on the fly for different sets of audiences. In other words, dynamic ad creative, rather than just dynamic ad placement. While the proposed tool is light on much further detail, it already looks well set to lock horns with the growing hostility surrounding generative AI among regulators. This has largely been triggered by the huge hubbub surrounding OpenAI’s generative text tool ChatGPT, which is currently being used to write everything from front-end code to cake recipes.…
Germany-based video codec vendor MainConcept will be celebrating its 30th birthday at NAB 2023 – and will be using the occasion to search for a soulmate that can bootstrap the company’s expansion into advertising. Revealed during a pre-NAB press conference, MainConcept is in the fledgling stages of adding a new layer beyond its specialized skills in supplying codec SDKs to the broadcast industry. It now wants to support next-generation advertising at the codec level – believing that doing so will open up a new chapter for advertisers by improving reach. MainConcept’s ad tech vision is based on the age-old notion that ads are inconveniences and viewers will take measures to skip, avoid, and ignore ads, at all costs. MainConcept wants…
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has received a petition from four congresspeople, asking for a reexamination of the $43 billion sale of AT&T’s WarnerMedia to Discovery. The politicians allege that it has enabled the new entity to “adopt potentially anticompetitive practices,” which include worse programming options for consumers and staff layoffs. Warner Bros Discovery’s CEO, David Zaslav, is not particularly well-liked in the industry, and given the cozy nature of big business and the US government, we suspect not many would rush to Zaslav’s defense publicly. The new giant is something of a posterchild for the hot-button issue of big business run amok in the US economy, and so the firm is a sensible target. Unfortunately, the current attack…
The run up to the 2023 NAB Show has seen a bunch of technology vendors drop press releases that are skewed towards the sports marketplace – some of them actual news, some of them simply sports-based revamps of long-standing products. With the announcements spanning most of the video workflow, from capture to ad-insertion, one could come to two different conclusions from these snippets. Either that the rapidly inflating value of live sports is causing rights holders and their supporting vendors to knuckle down on innovation, or – the more likely prospect – that vendors are re-packaging their products to get a slice of the pie. Partnerships and integrations also help give the impression of a fresh lick of paint. It’s…
This time last year, we were foreshadowing NAB Show 2022 as a battleground where ATSC 3.0 stakeholders would go in all guns blazing – to mark a triumphant comeback from the stalled NextGen TV rollouts triggered by the pandemic. Upon arrival at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the reality was a damp squib, and arguably that wasn’t such a bad thing, with ATSC 3.0 technologists hanging cautiously back, waiting for the right moment to strike when the iron is (finally) hot. Twelve months later, gearing up for NAB 2023, the iron is barely lukewarm. Trawling back through Faultline’s old headlines, stretching back to 2014 when work began on the US next-generation broadcast standard, tells a story with an unhappy ending…
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) held a press conference this week to discuss its upcoming enhanced direct-to-consumer streaming product. As expected, the merger of the studio giant’s two streaming properties, HBO Max and Discovery+, will transition to Max in the US market from May 23. This underwhelming unveiling was then proceeded by WBD executives spending more time reassuring attendees about the legacy of the HBO brand than on the future of Max as a competitive streaming platform. But first, the reason for dropping HBO from HBO Max is a simple one – because Disney+ has pillaged WBD’s share of the under-11s demographic. WBD executives did not explicitly call out Disney+ by name during the presentation, but these are not difficult dots…
In a report out last week called Sustainable Energy for All of Earth, and being referred to widely as Tesla Master Plan 3, the US car firm gives out a plan for sorting out global warming. When we read it there was nothing at all new in it, but that’s not the point – the point is that with Tesla’s reputation in some quarters tantamount to being the “oracle,” in clean energy, many new people will be wandering around quoting what it takes to solve all the Earth’s problems. And that’s a good thing. It’s a 41-page document and almost none of it is incorrect, just a few assumptions perhaps no longer mainstream, but most of what is said in…
German utility Onyx Power announced plans to build a 1.2 GW blue hydrogen plant in the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, in place of its 715 MW coal-fired power station. The decision came as a result of the Dutch Government announcing a nationwide ban on coal-fired power plants from 2030. Onyx Power aims to produce 300,000 tons of blue hydrogen from 2028, when the plant is expected to open. The choice of hydrogen color from Onyx Power might surprise a few given that the vast majority of hydrogen related announcements these days refer to green hydrogen produced from electrolysis driven by renewable energy from wind or solar as opposed to steam methane reforming (SMR) or autothermal reforming (ATR) combined…
Five years ago this week… Disney went out on a limb to spite both Rupert Murdoch and Comcast, offering to acquire Sky News in the UK, as well as the 21st Century Fox TV assets. Sky News had been the sticking point that had prevented Fox from acquiring the remaining 61% of Sky in the UK for $16.4 billion (many had feared Fox taking full ownership of Sky, due to Murdoch’s immense influence on UK government elections). Equally, with Comcast already bidding to acquire Sky for $31 billion, Disney’s involvement in the new outlet would massively complicate things. The seemingly impossible puzzle was eventually torn apart, with Comcast acquiring the Sky empire in September 2018. — Comcast-owned Sky is…
Still there are few true barometers of success in the burgeoning world of free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST), in pure money-making terms. Sure, eyeballs are turning in great numbers to FAST services – those offering both AVoD catalogs and ad-supported linear TV channels – but the financial sustainability of these services is what keeps investors up at night. Ad-supported streaming giant Chicken Soup For the Soul Entertainment (CSSE), for example, is consistently growing revenues at a more-than-encouraging clip. Full year 2022 revenues, hot off the press last week, ballooned to $252.8 million, a 129% upswing on 2021, which – in turn – was up 66% on 2020 revenues. Unfortunately, CSSE is still an unattractively unprofitable prospect. Net loss for 2022…
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, for many companies, can seem both impenetrable and irrelevant. In forecasts, it is often derided as inconsequential, and its operators are rarely the subjects of splashy press releases. However, a vibrant streaming ecosystem has evolved; one that has lessons to teach regarding the blending of video business models. For some context, MENA represents a combined population of some 511 million people, dwelling in some 107.6 million households, of which around 64.7 million have fixed broadband – around 60% penetration. With around 587.3 million mobile subscriptions, the region’s relative reliance on cellular connections for broadband is apparent, as the broadband penetration of households in North America and Europe is comfortably above 95%. MENA’s…
It was in the closing stages of Faultline’s latest live panel discussion where a fleeting mention of ChatGPT successfully stirred the pot among panelists. The session – entitled ‘The democratized future of aggregation, engagement, and discovery’ (available to watch in full on-demand here) – saw opposing opinions on whether OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer technology is headed for a revolution in recommendations or a hype bubble fated to burst unceremoniously. To our surprise, we learned that ThinkAnalytics – the UK-based content recommendations specialist – has already integrated ChatGPT into its own engine. ThinkAnalytics’ Peter Docherty, Founder and CTO, revealed that the firm is set to demonstrate the capabilities at the forthcoming NAB Show – giving little away to the Faultline audience…
In another project aiming to bring intelligence to dumb delivery pipelines, CDN behemoth Akamai has teamed with US video compression vendor Bitmovin. The new joint offering, launched just in time for NAB 2023, professes to minimize the negative impact of content delivery errors occurring due to separate data siloes between video players and CDNs. By pooling the Bitmovin Player with Akamai’s CDN and DataStream, the goal here is to minimize the cost of errors, which in an ideal world means eradicating errors entirely. This is why the joint offering is designed to support video developers with sniffing out the root causes of streaming issues and identifying ways to ultimately improve QoE – by sending content IDs and session IDs from…