Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Amid a list of mainly incremental improvements to the iPhone, the latest model – iPhone 14 – grabbed headlines for its satellite messaging service (see separate item) and its extended support for embedded SIM (eSIM). In both cases, it shared the strategy with T-Mobile USA, which separately announced its own plans to expand satellite and eSIM support, indicating two significant trends in broadening the ways that users and IoT devices can access connectivity, and be monetized by service providers. Apple has supported eSIM technology in iPhones since 2018, but in the new iPhone 14 models, at least for the USA, it will end support for physical SIM cards altogether. The new smartphones will be able to use two eSIMs at…
Five years ago this week… Faultline was taken aback by the news that Ericsson had landed a deal at Japan’s J:COM to provide its MediaFirst TV Platform. This marked the first time that a traditional cable firm with millions of existing customers had made a switch out of traditional cable to MediaFirst. Ericsson’s adoption of RDK the year before had been crucial in pushing this through, although we had suspected that this was more to bring the efficiencies of RDK to IPTV, rather than invade cable. — RDK has surpassed 100 million device deployments worldwide, rising from 80 million this time last year. RDK Management also revealed that 100 new technology companies have joined the open source community in the last year, reaching…
Businesses founded on intellectual property (IP) licensing need their lawyers to be as smart as their engineers as they seek to defend and enforce their rights. However, mobile processor IP giant ARM’s decision to sue one of its largest customers, Qualcomm, is a particularly high-stakes move, especially as Qualcomm itself has a huge licensing business whose legal department is rightly feared. ARM, which is still owned by Japan’s Softbank following a failed attempt to sell it to Nvidia, filed a lawsuit last week against Qualcomm and Nuvia, the advanced CPU developer that Qualcomm acquired at the start of 2021. ARM claims that the companies have broken the terms of their licensing deals and used ARM trademarks in relation to unlicensed…
Faultline approached The Greening of Streaming Second Annual Summit eager to hear about numbers, data and real action on the ground, rather than a merry-go-round of vague promises and calls to urgency. While we were not disappointed, any imminent structural change is likely to be led by the vendor community, rather than the bureaucracy of governments and regulators. A prime example came from Akamai veteran Ramesh Sitaraman, who offered a few case studies of how the streaming stakeholders are tackling the most recent set of challenges that have surfaced in tandem with carbon awareness. One issue for CDN providers is that the carbon efficiency of a national grid varies hugely on a country-by-country basis. In response, Akamai has created CarbonCast,…
During a Streaming Media Connect panel session, which Faultline tuned into last week, we concluded that the CTA Wave Project and the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) were working on separate overlapping projects. Well, it turns out that the two organizations are actually cooperating, not that you can spot that from either of their websites. This is something of a common occurrence in the industry, and one that is becoming increasingly grating. Neither site even returns any results for the other’s name. Worse still, neither mention ongoing projects, and while the SVTA does bury a mention of CTA Wave in its Partners and Alliances page, clicking to learn more just directs you to the CTA Tech website, from which it…
A mammoth six-hour event this week hosted by non-profit industry group Greening of Streaming teased what promised to be a fiery session. Hosting both Intel and AMD had all the makings of a slugfest of environmental credentials. Alas, this was not to be, and ended up being a damp squib. However, the rest of the second shift turned up all manner of juicy morsels. AMD’s Aaron Behman, currently the Media and Entertainment Executive but formerly of Xilinx, was on the offensive, firing off a slide that presented the Open Benchmarking top-five that saw Intel’s offering beaten out by five Epyc CPUs. “Compared to any other x86 platform out there, we have the most cores, and will have 96 per socket…
Meta’s Facebook has no plans to use VVC (Versatile Video Codec/H.266) in the near future, nor does it envisage betting big on HEVC, and is even more bullish when it comes to EVC (Essential Video Coding). As a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), hearing Meta sling mud at MPEG standards is nothing surprising or new, but it is interesting considering the social media giant’s recent breakthroughs with one particular MPEG standard – LCEVC (low complexity enhancement video codec). Ahead of Faultline’s own Video Codecs webinar this week (see separate write-up in this issue), we tuned into a recording from the recent Streaming Media Connect online event, where Facebook’s Director of Video Encoding, David Ronca, described EVC…
Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites generally circle the Earth at an altitude of somewhere under 1000km – sometimes as low as 160 km – which you would not be wrong to point out is rather far from your home, or anyone’s home for that matter. On the other hand, others see that distance as an opportunity – in a universe where sometimes the closest point to an end user is a satellite orbiting overhead. This is the vision of CDN and caching specialist Varnish Software, which has a project in the works with the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) 5G-Emerge consortium, together with the European Space Agency (ESA), to blanket satellite broadband and media services across rural parts of Europe. A budding…
Russia will not resume natural gas supplies to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline unless sanctions are lifted, according to statements made this week. The pipeline is the single biggest pipeline for gas from Russia to Europe and has the capacity to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year, amounting to 10% of total demand. Oil prices fell more than $1 per barrel on Wednesday to their lowest in over 7 months, largely driven by fears of rising interest rates and the impact a. broader global economic recession will have on fuel demand. Brent crude futures fell 1.2% to $92 per barrel. The move counteracted the rise seen on Monday as the OPEC+ cartel decided to cut…
General Electric will supply onshore wind turbines for Green Power Investment’s 80 MW project in Fukaura Town, Japan. The installation of the wind turbines at the project site is expected to commence in the Q2 2023, with completion expected in 2024. Corio Generation and TotalEnergies has joined forces with SK Ecoplant to develop the 2 GW BadaEnergy offshore wind portfolio in South Korea. The first of the capacity is aiming to come online in 2027. Copenhagen Energy has submitted a proposal for a 3 GW offshore wind farm off Australia. The Samphire project would be located in an area between 60 and 120 kilometers north of the city of Perth. EDF has completed the installation of all 80 turbines…
In the UK, the operator with the least need to deploy Open RAN might seem to be Virgin Media O2, since its mobile arm – formerly Telefónica O2 – had almost no reliance on Huawei equipment in its networks. By contrast, BT EE and Vodafone UK are both engaged in replacing Chinese equipment, which in Vodafone’s case has been one reason for its enthusiasm for Open RAN. A more open ecosystem could usher in a more diverse supply chain and the ability to deploy multivendor networks, Vodafone has argued, and its first commercial Open RAN networks have been rolled out in the UK, in a few rural areas. Ironically though, the operator that is chasing it is not BT –…
Businesses founded on intellectual property (IP) licensing need their lawyers to be as smart as their engineers as they seek to defend and enforce their rights. However, mobile processor IP giant ARM’s decision to sue one of its largest customers, Qualcomm, is a particularly high-stakes move, especially as Qualcomm itself has a huge licensing business whose legal department is rightly feared. ARM, which is still owned by Japan’s Softbank following a failed attempt to sell it to Nvidia, filed a lawsuit last week against Qualcomm and Nuvia, the advanced CPU developer that Qualcomm acquired at the start of 2021. ARM claims that the companies have broken the terms of their licensing deals and used ARM trademarks in relation to…
Amazon Prime Air has become rather coy over its drone delivery program in the USA two years after first gaining approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to start testing in August 2020. Now the company has received permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to conduct drone testing using millimeter wave spectrum over two years, with plans to start deliveries in two cities this year, followed by further assessments at three other locations in the country. Curiously, Amazon requested that most details of its Special Temporary Authority (STA) permit be kept confidential, citing competitive concerns. But it had to make public that the spectrum would be in the range 60.86-62.78 GHz, using transmit power of 100mW, and that the…
Standardization and certification for Open RAN has lagged behind technical developments as well as early deployments, which has led to some major operators creating their own ecosystems to ensure interoperability, notable examples being Japan’s Rakuten and Dish Network in the USA. Such a lag is typical of many fields, and can lead to de-facto standards taking hold, with Rakuten already enjoying some success through commercialization of its platform. Standardization is now playing catch-up with field deployments and proceeding in parallel with new projects. A key step came in June 2022 when the O-RAN Alliance announced its Certification and Badging (C&B) project, with the aim of providing facilities around the world where 5G Open RAN equipment can be tested for conformity…
Keysight Technologies attributes its recent better-than-expected results for its latest quarter to growth in demand for testing around 3GPP Release 16 accelerating faster than had been anticipated. The company also singled out growth in demand for testing of Open RAN components and non-terrestrial 5G networks as factors behind its 10% year-on-year revenue rise, in its fiscal third quarter, to $1.38bn. Profits for the quarter rose at a higher rate of 33% from $254m to $338m over the year. While Satish Dhanasekaran, Keysight’s president and CEO, was naturally keen to associate the performance with having the right strategy and effective execution of it, the company’s SVP of global sales Mark Wallace admitted it was also down to those specific 5G-related factors.…
Special Report: 5G testing There are two vital roles for testing in the lifecycle of a technology such as 5G, and both are highlighted in our reports this week. One is to put an emerging technology through its paces pre-commercially, to establish capabilities and identify problems. From the later phases of the R&D process, to the run-up to commercial launch, intensive testing by vendors, operators, test and measurement (T&M) specialists and industry alliances provides fascinating insights into how a technology may evolve. The first releases of 5G-Advanced standards are at this stage, as are some applications that may come to rely on next generation wireless connectivity, such as Amazon’s drone tests in high frequency spectrum. The other important aspect of…
UK-based video compression specialist V-Nova has presented results of a study hot off the press, carried out in collaboration with Intel and Meta, that shape MPEG-5 LCEVC as a valuable tool for enhancing SVT-AV1 (the Scalable Video Technology extension of the AV1 codec). The bottom line is improved compression efficiency – supporting efforts of the Alliance for Open Media to shake AV1’s power-guzzling reputation. While the technical research paper is not exclusive to SVT-AV1, also assessing LCEVC as an enhancement tool for quality-cycles trade-offs across the full complexity range for AVC, HEVC and AV1, it does appear that LCEVC is particularly well-suited for SVT-AV1. This in itself is not a surprising conclusion, as debates have come and gone ever since SVT-AV1…
Out with the new and in with the old. Wait, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Not for Firstlight Media, which has resurrected the former Quickplay Media brand just ahead of IBC 2022, after rescuing the remaining assets from inside the crumbling AT&T video empire in Q1 2020. It’s a move that makes a lot of sense, but at the same time is one that raises concerns that the newly formed company has struggled to reach the former glory days of Quickplay Media pre-acquisition – as a vendor known for supplying best-of-breed encoders, while supporting third-party encoders, and removing choke points for efficient OTT delivery with experience in handling high traffic volumes. When merged with Firstlight Media…
US record label Capitol Music Group (CMG) has dropped its first virtual artist, FN Meka, less than two weeks on from announcing the deal, citing “insensitivity” on its own part. Acting as a crash-course for the entertainment industry when it comes to AI-generated content, FN Meka was ridiculed for trivializing race issues and promoting stereotypes. CMG – a subsidiary of Universal Music Group – announced the signing of FN Meka just weeks ago, with the artist’s debut single ‘Florida Water’ released on streaming platforms immediately. While the vocals were delivered by an uncredited performer, all other aspects of the song were generated via AI processes – a vague umbrella term that can often obscure rudimentary technology. Factory New, a so-called…
Streaming Media Connect 2022, the outlet’s second virtual event of the year, hosted a panel that covered edge compute and content delivery, setting the stage for some of the main topics of IBC. The discussion illustrated one of the chief problems in this industry – overlapping projects and a lack of public-facing clarity. To get to that point requires a bit of exposition, but before we wind down that path, it can be briefly summarized by stating that it appears from the outside that the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA, formerly the SVA) and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which launched the Web Application Video Ecosystem (WAVE) Project, are both separately working on a multi-CDN configuration effort. Given the rising…