Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
With one week until the Olympic flame lights up Paris, details are trickling in of broadcast and transmission technologies being deployed by broadcasters at the 2024 Games. One of the more “out there” sports is surfing, not only in sporting flare but also in location – with the 2024 surfing competition taking place nearly 10,000 miles away from Paris on the coast of Tahiti. The logistical and technical nightmares that come from broadcasting a live event from the other side of the world, from an archipelago in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, calls for a unique set of technologies. For these reasons, France Télévisions has tapped Haivision, a specialist in live video contribution, and Obvios, a private 5G…
The inferno around the source of generative AI’s powers has softened somewhat following the inking of IP licensing deals between major news media outlets and the top trainers of large language models (LLMs). These licensing deals have been widely interpreted as watershed moments for the industry, yet Faultline has remained skeptical that these arrangements are anything more than payouts to postpone the inevitable litigation bloodbath. One underlying implication is that these so-called media-genAI “collaborations” favor only the established hierarchies – forging long-term lucrative licensing arrangements between the likes of OpenAI and NewsCorp. What hope does this leave the little folk? Well, some start-ups are vying to be the Robin Hood of the genAI arms race, including one called Avail with…
Video encoding vendor Ateme has reported a revenue decline of 17% for the first half of 2024, falling to €40.8 million ($44.5 million) compared to €49.1 million ($53.7 million) in H1 2023. The business was impacted by an ominous erosion of business in the US and Canada, which has been central to the French video software company’s spirited rise in recent years. A 6% increase in revenue for Q2 2023 helped partly offset Q1’s 35% fall in revenue, year on year, but not by anywhere near enough. The US and Canada region saw a 61% decline in revenue for the first half of 2024, when compared with H1 2023, which Ateme pins on a slowdown in investment decisions caused by…
The University of Michigan has published a study assessing the potential for a total coal to nuclear transition in the US and concluded that it’s mostly feasible to do so. Rethink Energy looked at some hard numbers to try and estimate how much this would cost and the result is eye-watering. Over half a trillion in what might be the best assumed scenario, cost-wise. The more complicated reality is that, in any case, it can’t do it within the timeline for decommissioning coal. The study looked at socioeconomic factors, safety, and proximity parameters and assessed coal plants by capacity in order to match them with the right class of advanced nuclear reactors such as microreactors, medium-scale reactors (MSRs), and small…
Volkswagen has signed a deal to produce solid-state batteries for 40 GWh of annual production, expected to be expanded to 80 GWh or 1 million EVs, with California’s QuantumScape licensing its formula to Volkswagen internal battery division PowerCo. This agreement has been in-progress since January, beginning with PowerCo testing a QuantumScape sample battery cell and finding 95% range retention over 300,000 miles, several times lower than in mainstream products today. The next step for the partnership is to finalize a product which will be deployed en masse in a Volkswagen Group vehicle series. Volkswagen’s announcement is some of the latest news on solid-state adoption, but it lacks a delivery date, and is only semi-solid, with a liquid ‘catholyte,’ implying only…
The Ossian floating wind farm has submitted a consent application to Scottish authorities for 3.6 GW of offshore floating wind, to be developed in the North Sea 84 kilometers out to sea, covering 858 square kilometers, with geotechnical surveys completed in November. This will be the world’s largest floating wind project, or one of the largest, depending on its completion schedule. As of end-2023, global floating wind had a 244 GW nominal project pipeline, but only 270 MW installed. The issue for floating wind is cost. Wind power is cheaper the simpler its base is – with onshore wind being cheap, competitive with solar and other cheap electricity types. Then costs get added once you build offshore – putting big…
This past week we interviewed Erick Petersen and Gregg Patterson, respectively the Chief Strategy Officer and CEO of Origami Solar. Origami is an Oregon-based startup, which has just kicked off Series A financing and started a hiring binge, with a strategy that envisions a series of steel solar module frame factories across the US and expanding around the world. We almost never cover the manufacturing of frames in the solar supply chain, because the investment cost of the production capacity is low, and there is basically been no technological angle to cover, compared to all the ongoing changes in the actual photovoltaic semiconductors. In Origami’s case, the Capex cost for a 750 MW production line is trivial compared to wafer-cell-module.…
South Korean operator SK Telecom has been leading the pack, and a national and global level, by investing in AI start-ups to diversify its services and build a telco-specific large language model (LLM). KT Corp has never been far behind, and now LG Uplus has stepped up and is laying out plans for its own AI strategy. SKT, the most active AI investor of the South Korean MNOs, has been building investments and partnerships with various US firms over the last two years. This week, SKT invested $200 million in California-based Smart Global Holdings (SGH). The US firm designs high-performance computing systems for AI workloads which will give SKT access to a suite of advanced AI products. This includes AI…
The Xchanging Ideas event always has an air of speed-dating, as speakers rattle through their slides. This time round, the focus was on 5G Advanced (5G Standalone, as defined in the upcoming 3GPP Release 18), where founder Kaneshwaran Govindasamy highlighted GSMA adoption figures for 5G NSA and SA. According to that GSMA poll, while 69% of operators had deployed 5G NSA, just 19% had already begun deployed 5G SA. Within the next year, 79% plan to deploy 5G NSA, compared to 31% in 5G SA, but by the time the question reaches the 3+ year mark, the gap has closed significantly – to 100% and 94%, respectively. This implies that the 5G SA roadmap is much quicker than 5G NSA.…
Portugal’s leading operator MEO has committed to massive MIMO (mMIMO) as a long term strategy to ensure more consistent performance across its 5G coverage area, including the uplink as well as downlink. This comes shortly after MEO claimed to have 96% of the country’s population covered with 5G, including all significant towns and cities. The operator is also facing the reality that actual performance obtained does not always live up to the promise and tends to fall away towards the boundaries of cells and during handover. MEO also sees mMIMO as critical for its ability to deliver more advanced 5G services to customers, in some cases through standardized APIs. MEO aims to open up its network to third party developers…
SoftBank Group has acquired Graphcore, a startup that has created a number of AI-focused chips but which has struggled to monetize its efforts. It appears to be a bargain, and at a time when AI and processor hype has never been higher, SoftBank is going to push Graphcore into the Arm ecosystem – big.LITTLE time. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Back in February, the rumor mill said Graphcore was for sale, and that it was looking for some $500 million. With the SoftBank news, a $600 million figure has been floated, which would suggest another bidder was present to drive the price upwards – but still below the total amount of funding raised, which means only…
Five years ago this week… UK IP video technology supplier Amino Communications acquired Dutch video app developer 24i Media for €24.1 million ($27.1 million), in what at the time appeared like a match made in heaven. The acquisition had very little overlap and highly complementary product lines, and Amino at the time said the long and short of the deal was all about integrating 24i’s smart framework with the Amino TV back-end with an immediate eye for increasing market share in the Android TV operator tier market The company rebranded as Aferian in 2021, and today while 24i is doing well, Amino device sales have cratered. Redbox, the DVD rental firm owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, is in the…
We are running out of fingers and toes to count all the new entrants in the smart TV operating system space. This week’s newest member is Indian titan Reliance Industries, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani. Reliance, whose media division Viacom18 has just merged with Disney’s Star India, runs a popular OTT service called JioCinema, which features, among many other programs, free streams of the Indian Premier League national cricket championship. Naturally, the name floated for this up-and-coming operating system is Jio TV OS, and the potential commercial launch for TVs running it could happen by Diwali—the Hindu festival of lights ending at the beginning of November—the Economic Times first reported. Built on Android, the operating system currently being beta-tested by…
The endless pursuit of improving image quality does not come without its pitfalls. The push for ever-higher resolution has hit a roadblock, with common use of 8K an unrealistic future, while the immediacy of widespread 4K broadcasts has taken a serious hit with UEFA’s decision not to deliver any of its competitions in a 4K UHD feed. Of course resolution is not the only parameter that improves perceived picture quality. High dynamic range and wide color gamut are beneficial to bettering the image, and are increasingly used to do so. In addition to these widespread features, TV makers introduce their own mix of supposed image-improving features, including the notorious motion smoothing, also known as frame interpolation, which has recently returned…
Much of the trade press have not yet caught wind of an extraordinary yet familiar dispute between DirecTV and Synamedia in the US, which sees the fraught satellite TV operator attempt to strongarm itself a free pass for Synamedia’s legacy conditional access technology (from the NDS days), without paying a dime (for the second time). In a counter-complaint filed in a California court this week, DirecTV claims it has rights to a perpetual license to Synamedia’s intellectual property. The pay TV company has requested that an injunction be issued against Synamedia to protect its business—which fundamentally relies on conditional access to distribute video content—from immediate harm. Succinctly, DirecTV took issue with the terms proposed in the contract extension to continue…
European natural gas prices experienced a decline as traders evaluated ample regional stockpiles in light of Hurricane Beryl’s potential impact on Texas, a crucial fuel supplier. Benchmark futures dropped by up to 3.1% on Monday, undoing earlier gains and highlighting Europe’s vulnerability to global disruptions despite robust inventories for this time of year. Currently, Europe benefits from well-supplied inventories and increased gas flows from Norway, while mild temperatures are forecasted in key markets like the UK, Germany, and France over the next week. However, market attention is focused on Hurricane Beryl, which has already prompted reductions in liquefied natural gas (LNG) production at Freeport LNG’s facility in Texas. Concurrently, Asia is experiencing heightened gas demand due to above-average temperatures driving…
M&A, IP, Patents TIM has finally completed the sale of fixed access network unit, called NetCo, for up to €22 billion to KKR, despite shareholder dissent from Vivendi. Income will be used to pay off debt, though not entirely. The Italian incumbent will be left with €7.5 billion in debt at the end of this year. TIM still has plans to sell its international operation, Sparkle. The newly formed MasOrange, the merged entity between Orange Spain and MasMovil, will invest more than €700m over the next three years €700 million in Andalusia to promote the economic and social development of citizens and companies. US wireless backhaul transport equipment vendor Aviat Networks has acquired 4RF, a provider of industrial wireless access technology, including narrowband point-to-point/multi-point…
While 5G Standalone promises highly advanced mission-critical communications applications, Motorola Solutions, the emergency communications specialist, is committing funding and resources to its land mobile radio (LMR) portfolio. This sector is a strong earner for Motorola despite the limits of the platform, and the vendor has no plans to change tack. Motorola Solutions is opening a new research and development center in Cork, Ireland to design software for the firm’s LMR portfolio, with plans to expand focus to other technologies in the future. The center will employ 200 staff in software development, test and automation, and general management. The expansion in Ireland is part of Motorola’s commitment to LMR, and shows the firm’s interest in expanding its software and subscription business.…
Rogers may have become Canada’s first operator to trial Cloud RAN, but is well behind many other leading operators, including peers in the USA. At least Rogers is now forging ahead, having earlier in 2024 completed testing of 5G network slicing, again with its main vendor Ericsson, along with a rollout plan for later in the year. The Cloud RAN trial was conducted at a recent Toronto Bluejays baseball game, and sought to establish the benefits in reliability, resiliency and efficiency, rather than just cost savings through use of commodity hardware. Rogers also extolled the virtues of cloud nativeness, which we discuss separately in the context of automation in this issue of Wireless Watch. “Cloud-native technology is a critical component…
Looking back at the past year, on the face of it, it has been a good year for the Vendors segment – the 20 companies that we track, as a bellwether for the wireless industry. With eight losses but twelve gains, the average growth in share price in the past year was a solid 28.64%. We track a set of five stock indexes, for context, as part of the tracker. Here, the average share price growth was 19.28%, over the past year, proving that the Vendors have punched above their weight. However, Nvidia has somewhat distorted the group, with its 200.87% growth through the past year. On the same hand, CommScope’s 79.55% loss is dragging most of the others down.…