Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Harmonic has thrown a curveball by quietly saying it will showcase watermarking integrations from both Viaccess-Orca and Nagra at IBC 2022, just one week after announcing what appeared to be an exclusive watermarking-encoder deal with the Kudelski company. Shortly after Faultline spotted the US encoding firm dropping the ball with a one-liner in its pre-IBC highlights earlier this week, we were told to wait for an official announcement, which was eventually issued just hours before we went to press. The significance is that we believe this is the first instance of two rival watermarking technologies being integrated by the same video encoding provider, and likely not the last. Presumably, it then comes down to customer choice about whether to insert…
In June 2021 the recently elected Senator Jon Ossof proposed his Solar Energy Manufacturing for America (SEMA) Act, and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) seized the moment to predict that the US could reach 50 GW of manufacturing capacity by 2030. Now that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has finally passed, including solar investment and production tax credits, the SEIA has published a new whitepaper, Catalyzing American Solar Manufacturing, which restates that 50 GW figure. In fact, the SEIA says the US can now get to at least 50 GW of manufacturing throughout the entire supply chain, all the way to polysilicon, with the first large facilities beginning construction in 2023 with modules, then gradually working back up through…
The Inflation Reduction Agreement has already substantially changed the supply chain for making cars around the world – with this week hurriedly signed deals between both Volkswagen and Mercedes with Canadian interests, opening the way for battery factories on US soil backed up with raw materials from Canada. The blanket refusal of the Biden administration to allow its new tax concessions to apply on either batteries or EV cars made outside of the US or its free trade partners (read Mexico and Canada) has overnight jeopardized battery factories in Europe. Volkswagen has around 2.5% of US vehicle sales, but in years gone by it had considerably more, amounting to 375,000 cars a year at present in a down market. Mercedes…
Europe has been left spinning after Russia cut down on natural gas exports and is now searching for alternatives. Falling supply and increased demand caused the price of natural gas to spike up but as a result Rethink predicts that demand will decrease, and the price will adjust accordingly from 2024. Rethink has just produced a research paper (order it from here) that analyzed the natural gas market based on electricity generation, home heating and industrial uses. Taking into account the readjusted positions of various European governments and their efforts to address the current crisis, the report compares the “what would have been” trend of natural gas with the “what will actually happen” trend as a result of the war.…
Malaysian operators agree to take stakes in wholesale national 5G Malaysian operators have finally caved into government pressure to take stakes in the country’s national wholesaler Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), set up as an alternative to staging a spectrum auction. The country’s big six operators, Celcom, Digi, Maxis, U Mobile, Telekom Malaysia and Time dotcom, have resisted the approach but have all now agreed to take equity in DNB. The impasse has held up the country’s deployment of 5G, which can now finally go ahead. The government had set an August 2022 deadline for operators to accept the stake in DNB, failing which they would lose access to 5G spectrum entirely, allowing foreign players to enter the market. This arm-twisting…
Germany’s fledgling fourth mobile operator, 1&1, has completed 5G tests under realistic conditions and is on course to launch commercial 5G services for home customers by the end of this year, following with mobile users in 2023. The company claims its Open RAN network performed well above expectations, reaching 1Gbps downstream and touching latencies close to 3ms. The operator is obliged by licence conditions associated with the 5G spectrum it acquired in 2019 to cover 50% of Germany’s population with 5G services by 2030. Owned by United Internet, the company currently offers wireless services via an MVNO deal with Telefónica Deutschland. Its network will be based on the platform devised by Rakuten Symphony and Symphony will also offer…
Bharti Airtel has been a major public supporter of Open RAN, though it recently said that the technology would not be ready for large 5G sites for some years. However, in trials, it has reported speeds of over 1Gbps, using test spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band. Airtel worked with Mavenir vRAN software on the trial, which ran between Chandigarh and Mohali. The operator’s CTO, Randeep Sekhon, commented: “This is a major milestone for the Open RAN ecosystem in India, and yet another validation of the growing readiness of 5G networks based on open architecture.” Airtel was the first operator in India to deploy an open vRAN solution, based on O-RAN Alliance specs, commercially. Its rival, Reliance Jio,…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has declared its AWS Private 5G available commercially in the USA, though it actually only supports LTE at present. It promised that expansion in both capabilities and geography will follow, including full 5G support, and offerings for various markets in Europe and elsewhere. This makes it a confusing roll-out so far, after AWS first unveiled its Private 5G in November 2021, and before that playing a more indirect role as cloud provider through partnerships with other vendors and some operators. But the November 2021 announcement was designed to get the ball rolling and goad operators into action, if subsequent statements by various AWS executives are to be believed. Part of the confusion can be…
Mavenir has put a slightly different spin on job cuts just announced than Parallel Wireless did around six weeks earlier at the start of July 2022, but in both cases most of the losses are in Wireless sales and marketing. Both also are keen to scotch any idea that these job losses reflect loss of momentum for the Open RAN movement, more an inevitable step in its early development. The job cuts could even be presented as sign of market maturation, as jobs shift from presales and marketing to aftersales, deployment and support. But that would be to gloss over the reality that at this stage, despite some prominent successes, the Open RAN movement has generated a lot more…
Special Report: Spectrum latest The more the world relies on wireless broadband to enable many business and leisure activities, the more spectrum capacity is required to power both licensed and unlicensed networks. That simple fact has turned spectrum into the biggest asset that licensed mobile operators have, and often the most important factor that determines the shape of their services and the market positions they can realistically take. In countries where auctions are the main way to allocate licensed spectrum, this has, in turn, driven up the prices paid for spectrum, especially in bands with limited capacity, such as the sub-GHz airwaves. India has finally held its first spectrum auction, after delays and disputes caused operator resistance…
Five years ago this week… AT&T went nuclear in the second broadband war, finally embracing G.fast (now Gfast) as US telcos looked to move out of the dark ages and into the gigabit era. Overriding the stubbornness of US MDUs, AT&T outlined its plans to take copper G.fast to MDUs in 14 metro areas, some of which were within Verizon footprints. It seemed that cable had finally lost its lead in headline fixed broadband speeds in the US. — With Paramount+ poised to start its global roll-out in 16 new countries, Accedo sent out a teasing mailer to brag about its involvement in the expansion effort. The Swedish video software vendor highlights the Paramount+ strategy of working with local…
Five years ago this week… Deutsche Telekom (DT) launched the hybrid TV service MAXtv at Hvartski Telekom in Croatia, using set top software from Zenterio to bring costs down dramatically. Croatia was the latest pit stop for DT’s disruptive OTT video drive in Europe, having launched a €2 TV service in Germany just months earlier and following similar services in Greece, Romania and Slovakia. MAXtv allowed content to be viewed on phones and laptops, with online content delivered as an Adaptive Bit Rate stream. MAXtv has since not been deployed anywhere else, as DT pushes full steam ahead with MagentaTV. — US smart TV maker Vizio has snatched a baby from the arms of pay TV operators, by introducing…
FuboTV has fallen victim to inflation hitting a 40-year high, suggesting other video businesses will start thinking and behaving more economically – to the detriment of innovation. The sports streaming service has placed plans for an integrated betting proposition under strategic review. FuboTV got in touch with Faultline to dispute our use of the words “shelved” and “freezes” regarding this strategic review – but, to us, the term placed under strategic review is as good as shelved. A company representative clarified that Fubo Gaming and its integrated bettering platform, Fubo Sportsbook, will continue to operate. “It will still be live in Iowa and Arizona, and continue to launch in additional markets. It is expected to launch in New Jersey in…
JW Player will be showcasing the fruits of its mid-2021 acquisition of video orchestration vendor Vualto and $100 million worth of product innovation funding for the first time at IBC 2022 – via a new end-to-end set of video tools designed to accelerate the streaming strategies of broadcasters. Some 16 months to fully integrate Vualto into JW Player is an awfully long time, not that this timeline will bother broadcasters. What Europe’s biggest and brightest broadcast minds will be interested in is the emphasis on security features, data intelligence, and monetization tools at their fingertips, with a single platform for high-quality live and on-demand video delivery across mobile, web and OTT platforms. Being targeted at broadcasters, it’s strange that the…
Q: what happens when a video quality specialist, a security expert, and a pair of video data professionals walk into a room? A: a whole load of potential solutions to the many challenges that comes with delivering, monitoring, and monetizing sports content. That’s what Faultline got when we welcomed SSIMWave, Verimatrix, 24i, and Firstlight Media onto our Sports Challenge live panel session this week – a discussion influenced by the migration of sports online and the resultant struggles of OTT video providers the world over to reliably deliver sports content. No example is more pertinent than DAZN in Italy (see separate update on Sky Italia this week), which spiraled so far into QoE chaos that it even incited government intervention.…
In the same breath that Warner Bros Discovery revealed plans to push deeper into free ad-supported streaming TV, Disney is joining in the fun, announcing the roll-out of an ad-supported tier of Disney+ in the US from early December 2022 and internationally from 2023. The date is critical, as it will see Disney beat both WBD and Netflix to the ad punch, by many months. Taking in the bigger picture, it seems strange to frame this as Disney getting a head start in ad-supported content given the abundance of free content already out there. Nonetheless, a head start it is against these two major rivals, although we reserve that Disney has a history of rushing things to market before the…
A provincial government in Pakistan has granted permission for the construction of a 400 MW green hydrogen project, powered by 500 MW of wind and 700 MW of solar power. The facility will be developed by Oracle Energy, a JV owned 70% by Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum – a member of Dubai’s royal family – with the remaining 30% being held by Oracle Power. The project aims to produce 55,000 tons of green hydrogen per year. Dominion Energy has received final approval for its 2,600 MW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project in Virginia. The development is expected to enter operation in 2026. Shell has acquired a 2,900 MW portfolio of renewable power projects in India from Actis, for…
This week has seen oil prices fall to levels not seen since before the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a global recession starts to bite, the oil industry must realize that the heyday of the past few months is over. Rethink Energy anticipates that it has just two years to get its affairs in order before consumers present an unrelenting squeeze on global oil demand. Sitting at around $95 per barrel, Brent Crude oil – a global benchmark – is now below the $96.84 per barrel it closed at on February 23. The West Texas Intermediate has dropped below $90 per barrel. Both have now fallen over 25% since they peaked above $130 per barrel in March. With…
The price of polysilicon is to fall steeply from the start of 2023, according to new Rethink Energy research tracking production capacity expansion plans announced by nineteen Chinese companies. With millions of tons planned, up from today’s global capacity of 880,000 tons, with investment costs running to the tens of billions of dollars, the most likely outcome is another decade of overcapacity and prices bumping along at marginal production costs. The companies involved can all see the overcapacity coming and have announced their investments in multiple phases, with latter phases “dependent on market conditions.” But the 18-month build time of these factories, the record high prices still being set for the rest of 2022, and the rapid and erratic growth…
South Korea’s first ATSC 3.0 deployments arrived three years before tests in the USA were eventually promoted to permanent NextGen TV signals. Despite the two nations being trailblazers of ATSC 3.0 technologies in their own rights, cooperation on business models has been an afterthought – arguably slowing down US deployments of NextGen TV. It is only now, two years since the first US network affiliates set ATSC 3.0 in stone across Las Vegas, that Sinclair Broadcast is teaming up with two top Korean broadcasters – KBS and MBC – to jointly develop and implement NextGen TV technology and business models. There are also technical collaborations with SK Telecom, via a joint venture called Cast.era, whose latest focus is…