Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Five years ago this week… Netflix announced what was deemed to be its most successful set of quarterly results yet, side-stepping the usual second quarter slump by smashing the 100 million subscriber milestone and surpassing its own growth estimations by 73%. With revenues and operating incomes both up significantly, investors were suddenly more willing to grin and bear the extreme original content strategy, with $6.6 billion spent in the year previous, and $16 billion committed to original content between 2017 and 2022. Edge caching connoisseur Qwilt claims that over 100 members of the National Cable Television cooperative (NCTC) members, mostly cable operators, are running its platform-as-a-service, based on Open Caching specifications and running on Cisco infrastructure. It comes as…
The saga of the UK telecoms and media business continues to twist, with Virgin Media O2 reported to be seeking to acquire broadband provider TalkTalk. VMO2 was formed in June 2021 as a joint venture between Liberty Global’s Virgin, the UK’s largest cableco, and Telefónica’s mobile arm, O2 UK. Now it may be looking for additional scale to mount an increased fixed/mobile challenge to incumbent BT. Late last week, reports emerged from the City and from UK news media, linking the two companies with a potential deal that could be valued around £3 billion ($3.6 billion). Discussions are at an early stage and on a non-exclusive basis, Sky News reported. TalkTalk delisted from the stock market in 2020 after a…
The merger of South Korean streaming services Tving and Seezn is a strategy that could have – should have – saved the fates of many forgotten OTT video businesses the world over, had management and investors been able to put stubbornness aside. Pay TV operators in particular should be more open to the idea of spinning off their streaming video ventures and then merging with a rival to better compete with thoroughbred streaming heavyweights. Instead, countless $billions have been lost as content catalogs wither on the vine. Consolidating the two South Korean operations is an attempt to form a business capable of challenging Netflix, which it may surprise some to learn is the most popular OTT video platform in South…
The videogame industry is enjoying a period of sustained growth. Depending on definitions, gaming is now worth between $200 billion and $300 billion annually. Most recently, this has been fueled by the arrival of microtransactions, and as our video services are experimenting with new business models, there are lessons to be learned from the gaming sector. Before the microtransactions explosion, the arrival of mobile gaming opened the door for in-game adverts, usually in free-to-play games available on both iOS and Android. For consoles, games have always required a purchase fee. Over the past decade, the industry has flipped from physical sales to digital downloads, which are now major contributors to global traffic – with some flagship titles requiring more additional…
Faultline’s Sustainability in Media and Technology webinar this week – the first of a two-parter – discussed the power struggles (figuratively and in wattage terms) in content delivery networks and cloud workflows. While the hour-long debate with representatives from Blackbird, Cerberus Tech, Greening of Streaming, and Velocix only scratched the surface of environmental challenges for video streaming businesses, our collective mission was vindicated as the chat tab reverberated with calls from the audience to continue conservational conversations. Highlights from the panel include Velocix admitting it would be open to working with fierce CDN rival Akamai on energy-reduction projects. Panelists also sided with the cloud computing titans which are apparently getting much better at sharing ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) data…
You would have thought that when Canoo got an order for 4,500 Electric Delivery Vehicles from Walmart that its share price would have moved upwards and it did, but the valuation of Canoo is still only around$1 billion At an average cost of $35,000, that order is probably worth $160 million or more. These vehicles will be used for Walmart Last Mile Deliveries in its growing eCommerce business. At one stage Canoo had been valued at over $4 billion, until short sellers decided that its SPAC route to public ownership, left unanswered questions. Walmart is supposed to receive first deliveries in 2023. So far Canoo has not shipped any self-driving cars, and last week reported a battery fire in one…
In the dying days of last week, just after we had put our latest issue together, a group of “energy storage” players in Europe expressed their dismay at European Union policy and its complete lack of targets and funding around energy storage. The complaints were addressed in an Open Letter to policy makers and the media, and it demonstrated what we all know only too clearly, that politicians do not understand zero emissions targets and the science around them. The organizations who served as signatories on the Open Letter included BESS supplier Fluence, investor Gore Street Capital, the UK’s Gresham House, Swiss energy storage provider MW Storage, UK renewables player Zenobē, the Spanish, Irish and German Energy Storage Associations, the…
It could be biologists – not engineers – that have solved the aviation industry’s multi-billion-dollar problem of how to reach net zero emissions. Recent advances in synthetic biology claim to have produced a genetically modified soil bacteria that can produce a fuel even more energy dense that fuels available on the market today. Published in the journal Joule, academics from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, have developed a way to produce cyclopropane (CP) rings using bacteria, producing one of the most energy-dense hydrocarbon structures known. Unlike normal hydrocarbons, where carbon atoms bond with up to four other atoms in a tetrahedral – often hydrogen – CP rings are only composed of three carbon atoms. The acute angles between the…
Large military organizations often have deep R&D pockets and can provide challenging environments in which to put a new commercial technology through its paces. Nokia is leveraging the US Department of Defense’s testbeds to trial a method of supporting spectrum sharing controlled by a RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). The RIC is the most significant new element of the Open RAN architecture and Nokia was an early developer of a RIC, and a contributor to O-RAN Alliance standards. AT&T has been its most prominent RIC triallist so far. However, its early work was focused primarily on non-real time RIC functions and was criticized for lack of support for the most demanding applications as well as for limited multivendor interoperability.…
The saga of the UK telecoms and media business continues to twist, with Virgin Media O2 reported to be seeking to acquire broadband provider TalkTalk. VMO2 was formed in June 2021 as a joint venture between Liberty Global’s Virgin, the UK’s largest cableco, and Telefónica’s mobile arm, O2 UK. Now it may be looking for additional scale to mount an increased fixed/mobile challenge to incumbent BT. Late last week, reports emerged from the City and from UK news media, linking the two companies with a potential deal that could be valued around £3bn ($3.6bn). Discussions are at an early stage and on a non-exclusive basis, Sky News reported. TalkTalk delisted from the stock market in 2020 after a sale…
Some operators are seeking to reduce costs by cutting staff significantly, engaging in outsourcing and as-a-service deals and stepping up automation initiatives. But a group of operators is taking the opposite view, at least when it comes to developing crucial software for virtualized networks, cloud platforms and new applications. Vodafone has been a prominent exponent of staffing up in order to establish differentiation and control of its own platforms. Now fellow UK-based operator, incumbent BT, is following suit. BT has announced it plans to increase its “digital workforce” by transferring thousands of staff into its Digital arm, and hiring about 400 new employees, to boost the unit from 3,500 to 6,300 people by April 2024. In this respect…
It has been a busy month for AT&T Mexico, which has confirmed a deal with Nokia for 5G technology and application development; coming just after completing the migration of Telefónica Mexico’s traffic to its network. These two developments are related in the sense that both Telefónica and AT&T Mexico – the country’s second and third largest mobile operators respectively – have been struggling to compete with number one América Móvil, whose Telcel services has been squeezing subscribers out of them. Currently Telcel has 64% of the country’s mobile subscribers, up from 62.5% at the end of 2021, while Telefónica’s Movistar is on 20% and AT&T about 16%. For Telefónica, the migration of traffic to AT&T’s radio network saves…
The latest effort to develop ubiquitous mobile connectivity by combining terrestrial 5G with satellite networks is being undertaken by Ericsson in collaboration with Qualcomm and French aerospace group Thales. The three companies have already conducted various studies and simulations to assess feasibility of implementing 5G across terrestrial cellular networks and low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, with the next step being to begin smartphone use case testing and validation of the 5G non-terrestrial network (NTN) elements. Ericsson is claiming that the project could enable global wideband data coverage for 5G smartphones by filling in gaps in remote areas or rugged terrain open to the sky but obstructive for terrestrial signals. “This testing and validation cooperation between…
Five years ago this week… Quantenna parroted Broadcom, declaring that it too would be licensing the AirTies mesh for operators. This felt symbolic of operators shifting their focus from hardware to software when deploying WiFi in homes, as most realized that simply putting a clever chip inside a gateway was no longer enough to ensure competitive in-home coverage. At the time, Faultline sensed a large “AT&T-size” US operator forcing this union, so it was of no surprise when AT&T announced that AirTies would be serving its Smart WiFi Extender just six months later, in January 2018. — DAZN is rumored to be plotting a bid for European broadcaster Eleven Sports, according to The Financial Times. Eleven’s portfolio includes the…
The DVB Project has announced the addition of the China-centric AVS3 codec to its core specifications, opening the door for new deployments in China. Coming only a few months after adding VVC, the DVB Project says work is continuing on adding AV1, despite AV1 being a finished codec for rather a lot longer than VVC. To some extent, the support for AVS3 in the DVB stack might be the second crack of the whip for AVS in the Chinese broadcast market. However, the Chinese government is fond of in-housing as much of its technology choices as possible, so betting big on DVB success is probably misguided. Stranger things have happened. Back in July, AV1, VVC, and AVS3 were selected as…
Winding the clock back circa 2019, the media and entertainment market was in a state where it was easy to write off a TV software supplier like Zappware as another headed for a fate similar to fallen soldiers including Zenterio, Ooyala, Massive Interactive, and Arkena, to name a few. Faultline has remarked before how one of the secrets to Zappware’s now 21-years of doing business in TV software and services, is an inherent capacity to reinvent oneself over time. As statements of reinvention go, they don’t come much greater than acquisition – with Zappware making a surprise play for Swiss rival iWedia this week, for an undisclosed amount. Splashing cash is not Zappware’s usual style when it comes to adapting…
“It goes much deeper than a just-in-time packager,” states Synamedia’s Julien Signes, Head of Video Networks, in response to Faultline’s probing of the video software vendor’s acquisition of French start-up Quortex. To have acquired a business with patented methods of automatically scaling cloud resources up and down ticks a lot of customer RFP boxes, including reducing cloud costs by up to 67% and slashing CO2 emissions – all while building video streams on-the-fly based on user requirements. Video service providers have been crying out for such technology, regardless of delivery mechanism and end user devices. It looks like a real scoop for Synamedia – which is why it also feels too good to be true. A seed of suspicion was…
Villainous, disingenuous, yet surprisingly receptive to technical feedback. These are just a few off-the-record words used by video industry insiders to describe the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), the organization behind the AV1 video codec. It would now appear that European Union (EU) antitrust regulators are in agreement with at least one of the above adjectives, as the European Commission has launched an investigation into AOM’s infamously divisive royalty-free licensing policy. Reuters has blown the lid on the investigation, with a spokesperson confirming with the outlet that a preliminary investigation is ongoing. A caveat in the letter seen by Reuters states that “being at a preliminary stage does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation on the existence of an…
Contracts for over 11 GW of clean energy capacity has been awarded in the UK’s latest Contract for Difference auction, almost doubling that awarded in the previous round. Over 7 GW of the capacity will come from new offshore wind farms, including the Inch Cape 1 (1,080 MW), Moray West (294 MW), Hornsea Three (2,852 MW), Norfolk Boreas (1,396 MW), and East Anglia 3 (1,372 MW). Hexicon also secured a strike price of $87.30 per MWh for its 32 MW TwinHub Floating Offshore Wind Project. Cloudberry Clean Energy will sell 50% of its shares in Cloudberry Offshore Wind to form a joint venture with Hafslund. With the transaction expected to close in September, the pair will then aim to develop…
As the UK Conservative party begins to get to grips with appointing a new leader, it finds itself in jeopardy that whomever it appoints it will have zero chance in the next election. Net zero chance. That candidate has to perfect the art of saying things that it does not quite believe to get into power, and then change their tune come 2025 and the next election. That is certainly the case as every candidate lays out their promises which only need to convince Conservative party MPs, many of which are Climate Change deniers, who want to prioritize oil and gas investment, cut green premiums, and put the party’s zero emissions ambitions on the back burner. So that’s what all…