Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
With metadata now as crucial to the video industry as electricity, vendors that supply the stuff are having to get creative when carving out a niche in a crowded market. For automated video analytics specialist Media Distillery, this means getting more granular, especially in the live sector where most of its competitors are not so nimble. One technique here is breaking content up into multiple segments of descriptors. “What is happening in the first five minutes will be completely different to the next five minutes,” the company’s CPO, Matin Prinz, explained to Faultline on a call this week. “For metadata generation, our customers often have the biggest gaps in unscripted, live content verticals like sports, news and talk shows,” he…
Standards documents never make for thrilling reading, and the latest update to the DVB multicast ABR (M-ABR) spec is no exception. With no supporting quotes or announcements from members that might have worked on it, digging deeper into the document turns up an addition from Broadpeak, the current leader in M-ABR momentum. The DVB spec itself is the basis for many, if not most, M-ABR implementations. The DVB Project, the organization that develops the namesake broadcast standards, publishes these specifications inside its BlueBook documents. The new A176r3 book consists of the updated DVB-MABR spec, while A181r1 houses the implementation guidelines. The announcement notes that the latest version “addresses several change requests, along with some new topics related to the Phase…
There was a palpable elephant in the room at Connected TV World Summit in London this week, which could easily rebrand as the Android TV World Summit, if there wasn’t already an event of the same name. It was no coincidence that the only RDK-focused panel of the conference ended abruptly without time for audience Q&A, while a presentation from Deutsche Telekom – which along with Vodafone is leaving RDK in the dust for Android TV – felt forcibly diluted in its platform agnosticism. With two of Europe’s largest operators abandoning RDK video technology, it raises questions about the open source group’s future in Europe as operators are engulfed by the Google ecosystem. Sky has been on hand to wave…
Nagra rued the timing of a panel session at Connected TV World Summit in London this week. Seated alongside representatives from Nordic pay TV operator Allente and video UX developer 3SS, it transpired that the Swiss content security specialist, a long-term CAS supplier to Allente, is not involved with the new 4K streaming dongle – announced conveniently (or not) just two hours prior to the start of this opening discussion. A few blank faces and some passing of the microphone confirmed Nagra’s absence from Allente’s latest hardware roll-out, and it quickly became apparent why – because this particular deployment is Google TV, not Android TV. In fact, Allente has become the first operator in the EMEA region to deploy Google…
Vodafone strikes multiyear deal with Lenovo for IoT connectivity Vodafone has reached a multi-year deal with Chinese consumer electronics maker Lenovo to incorporate global IoT connectivity with embedded SIMs in the latter’s devices. The agreement between Vodafone’s international business division, and Lenovo’s connectivity management group will kick off in Spain during May 2023 with plans then to cover 40,000 devices including other European countries. Vodafone will provide a global IoT data SIM, to fit into each Lenovo device and integrate with an app. “To comply with country specific regulations, the two companies have focused on a local communications service model, overseen by a global IoT management platform,” said Vodafone. Initially, Vodafone Spain produced a customized version of the company’s IoT…
Geopolitical shadows inevitably hung over the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, though with Huawei occupying its traditional, outsized space in Hall 1, the effects of US-Chinese trade and security stand-offs were perhaps less obvious than they might have been. But many of the key themes of the show – which tends to set the industry’s tone for the year ahead – reflected that we are in a phase where national politics is helping to shape mobile markets. This was particularly true in the ongoing Open RAN debates. Policy makers in the USA have certainly leapt on the promise of a broad, multivendor ecosystem as a way to rebuild a homegrown telecoms network business and fill the procurement gaps…
The differing stances of traditional enterprise IT companies over private 5G networks provided a revealing subplot at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 earlier this month as they jostled for position after nearly all of them focused major announcements on the event. The implications for telcos were mixed, with some vendors such as HPE almost determinedly excluding them from their plans, while others like Dell at least included them to some extent in their unfolding strategies. These somewhat divergent strategies reflected the varying recent fortunes of the IT vendors themselves. For IBM and HPE, the last 30 years, and also past decade, have been roller coasters where the dips have been steeper than the rises. In fact, IBM has been in…
Testing priorities are different for private 5G than public macro networks, with greater emphasis on security and working out how best to frame SLAs (Service Level Agreements) than over general performance and coverage. Three major testing vendors, the UK’s Spirent, Keysight Communications from the USA, and Germany based Rohde & Schwarz (R&S), were more vocal about private enterprise networks at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 than at previous such events, even if they were still unsure where the dividing line between hype and reality should be drawn. This reflects the reality that the private network sector, currently a mixture of 4G LTE and 5G, is on the road from hype to reality with variations between verticals, as Spirent…
Major trade shows are useful barometers of technology trends or industry movements and MWC 2023 was more valuable than usual as the biggest event of its kind since the pandemic. The omens were mixed for Open RAN, which was supposed to have been boosted by the geographical fragmentation of the industry where in many cases choice of macro RAN supplier has been cut to just three at most as Huawei and ZTE have been effectively excluded from North America and much of Europe. Yet many operators remain lukewarm, despite obvious concerns over reduction of choice and constriction of the supply chain. In almost any industry there is a happy medium between too much fragmentation with its toll on efficiency, scale…
The case for high frequency mmWave deployments has shifted from pure densification to filling in capacity for congested areas, and also, through advanced beamforming, longer range applications where Line of Sight (LoS) can be achieved, including Fixed Wireless Access and temporary deployments such as construction sites. Such changes are reflected in the noises being made by regulators as they consult over impending licensing of the frequencies. UK regulator Ofcom has just identified congested areas such as train stations and football grounds as ripe for mmWave spectrum by boosting capacity and bit rate, in an attempt to attract interest in its consultation ahead of auctions of licenses for cities. The regulator argued both the 26GHz and 40GHz bands for 5G would…
Following the completion of the O-RAN Alliance’s standards Release 2 in late November, and the Fall 2022 PlugFest in early December, a certain winter lull set in at the interest body, only briefly interrupted by the announcement of two new OTICs (open testing and integration centers) in North America and Japan, the first batch of Release 3 specifications, and the return of face-to-face meetings. Now, the Alliance is out of hibernation and back in force, busy once more advancing the interests of the beleaguered Open RAN community, this time with a three-pronged announcement: For one, the Alliance is shoring up its ranks and cementing friendships with sympathetic partners, signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OAI),…
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) has emerged as a major new revenue earner for operators, but there is still debate over the economics and the best situations for deploying it. Such debate could be heard in various places around Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, along with more detail than before on the whole end to end service, including the home network behind the CPE, which will often be WiFi. There was also an Open RAN angle, given that Mavenir, a leading evangelist for that cause, had launched its FWA package in January 2023 with MWC 2023 in mind. The company claimed this had already been deployed by several regional telcos, presumably in the US which is the biggest and fastest growing…
The latest episode of Green Streams, the monthly excerpt from Greening of Streaming members meetings, took a slightly different spin on the sustainability debate – welcoming co-founder of The People-Centered Internet (PCI), Mei Lin Fung. PCI is not a hands-on engineering-focused non-profit outfit like Greening of Streaming, but is positioned to promote connectivity, tackle misinformation, educate on technology ethics, and ultimately foster an internet economy that is built on the needs of real people, not big business. It all sounds like another fluffy pipedream created by people who feel betrayed by what the internet has become and the billionaires it has fostered – overshadowing the communities that the internet’s compulsion has left in the dark. PCI’s founding principles are, if…
As a specialist in slicing and dicing content schedules for the sake of automatically correcting TV program guides, one has often wondered why Media Distillery has not been more active in the advertising space, given the Dutch vendor’s regular work with SCTE 35 ad markers. In fairness to Media Distillery, it has been about two years since the vendor started proving its worth in delivering more than just automatic adjusting of TV start-times, but to open up new monetization opportunities by inserting pre-roll ads into the TV replay environment. But with the onward march of free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) services, the time is now to get serious about ads. Media Distillery has bulked up its advertising arsenal with the…
In the run up to Embedded World, perhaps the premier event for silicon hype, a raft of announcements caught Faultline’s eye. Last week, it was BrainChip’s neuromorphic brain-like designs, and this week, we are diving into iPronics’ photonic microchips – which have just started shipping to customers. iPronics is based in Valencia, Spain, and was founded in 2019. It has been plugging away at designing chips that use photons of light, rather than electrons of electricity, to create the required integrated circuits for a functional processor. Unsurprisingly, fiber optic communication and lasers are major draws for photonic chips, and a recent unrelated test at the University of Denmark in Copenhagen demonstrated a 1.84 petabit (Pbps) throughput in a single fiber…
Verizon declares mmWave star of SuperBowl Verizon declared mmWave an undisputed winner at last month’s NFL (National Football League) SuperBowl in the USA, after having invested over $100m in network upgrades and enhancements in and around State Farm Stadium and the greater Phoenix area. Verizon installed 490 5G nodes, 66 of which were its latest 5G mmWave nodes, alongside 1,400 4G and 5G antennas. Some of the capacity was over mid band C wave spectrum, but Verizon insisted that it was mmWave that stood out by providing the capacity to carry the huge amount of traffic in the area, amounting to 47.8 TB of data at the game on February 12th, 57% up on 2022. This is significant in so…
US broadband analytics outfit OpenVault has been granted a patent with potential to throw down the gauntlet to rivals in the WiFi diagnostics and optimization space. The US patent (no. 11,477,072) describes a “system and method for prescriptive diagnostics and optimization of client networks” – which OpenVault says provides operators with a full view of elements that contribute to the end user experience. This includes subscriber networks, connected devices, CPE, access networks, and services, to enable proactive operational optimization. The patent is effectively a method of automatically remediating issues in subscriber WiFi and Ethernet networks to reduce truck roll for operators. The figure attached shows a block diagram depicting an implementation of an environment for managing subscriber networks using a…
Fixed Wireless Access has emerged as a major new revenue earner for operators but there is still debate over the economics and the best situations for deploying it. Such debate could be heard in various places around Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, along with more detail than before on the whole end to end service, including the home network behind the CPE, which will often be WiFi. There was also an Open RAN angle, given that Mavenir, a leading evangelist for that cause, had launched its FWA package in January 2023 with MWC 2023 in mind. The company claimed this had already been deployed by several regional telcos, presumably in the USA which is the biggest and fastest growing market…
Where is our money, seemed to be the unframed question posed by many operators at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, and the answer still seemed to be manana manana. It is true many operators are deriving incremental revenues from 5G, but these are often just crumbs that fail to satisfy the appetite for the more serious remuneration required to return their major investments in 5G spectrum and equipment in a reasonable time. One of the problems was that 5G itself was overhyped at the beginning with early networks delivering little better than 4G and even when they did only some of the time, or in small areas close to base stations. The experience was often either underwhelming…
Malaysia’s Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB) single wholesale network (SWN) is facing renewed obstacles following the country’s general elections four months ago on November 19th, 2022. The newly elected government has its sights trained on DNB over transparency concerns, and the country’s largest operator, Maxis, remains unconvinced and is stubbornly holding out on its participation. The DNB, a scheme to base all of Malaysia’s 5G services on just one underlying wholesale network shared by all operators, has been controversial from the start. Supporters share the federal government’s view that employing an SWN would save mobile operators massively on capital expenditure (capex), forcing them to focus on innovative services. It would avoid duplication of infrastructure, while also bringing much-needed high-speed bandwidth to…