Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
As viewers flock to connected TV in droves, many content creators are realizing the need to have a native outpost on the relatively new medium. One vendor holding creative hands along the way is Delaware-based VlogBox, which offers full stack development for creating CTV channels and apps, as well as advertising services and audience analytics. Speaking to the company’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, Anna McMichael, we quickly learned that VlogBox regular opts to work with Roku, as it provides a hospitable OS for new CTV entrants. McMichael notes that Roku offers the best category breakdowns in its UI for better channel discovery – “we focus on the platforms that promise discoverability.” VlogBox also regularly works with Amazon Fire and Google…
The four-week countdown to NAB 2022 has commenced – and among the early buzz of pre-show marketing mailers are any technologies enabling low-latency video. Being a broadcast event at heart, the streaming camp has long been outdone in the latency department – with broadcast transmission typically in the 5-second range, while IP-based delivery still – despite the strides made in low-latency steaming protocols – lags at around 40 seconds. Our attention was piqued by a whitepaper on the topic of removing the final barriers to low-latency video from French encoding vendor Ateme, hot off the press. The reason being is a snappy and honest introduction that confesses how using the example of your neighbors cheering during a live sporting event…
The recent spate of operators offloading their tower assets has bemused Faultline for some time. Towers are old hat for video delivery, and it feels like less and less TV is consumed via terrestrial broadcast. So why are tower portfolios now commanding historic prices, and what skin does pay TV have in that game? The short answer seems to be that the current market greatly values towers, as a speculative asset that it expects to increase in value as MNOs struggle to upgrade their networks to support 5G capabilities. For operators that have struggled with cashflow, and that are not in the business of mobile networks, offloading towers to ditch a burden and inject some much-needed cash is a no-brainer.…
Faultline has only covered campaign analytics specialist MarketCast on a handful of occasions, yet we always find ourselves returning to a similar narrative – sensing a fierce yearning to break out of its father’s shadow and into a business built on a powerful combination of data science with primary research. Six acquisitions later (that we know of), MarketCast is making massive strides towards business diversification that rivals can only awe at. The latest item on the US firm’s shopping list is Phoenix Marketing International, which adds an advertising analytics flavor to MarketCast’s research broth. Together with the acquisitions of a virtual audience analytics testing suite from Invoke (2021), smart TV and set top data science firm Deductive (2020), Turnkey Sports…
China has unveiled a set of updated targets to its hydrogen strategy, with plans to increase production of green hydrogen to 200,000 tons by 2025. The Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Hydrogen Energy Industry (202 to 2035) is likely to support electrolysis capacity of around 1.3 GW, although we expect to see this target surpassed by the ambition of individual provinces and companies such as Sinopec. Beijing also aims to see about 50,000 hydrogen-fueled vehicles on roads by 2025, up from about 7,500 today. Global wind power additions hit a new record in 2021, according to new research from BloombergNEF, with installations hitting 99.2 GW. This marks a 0.7% increase from the 98.5 GW installed in 2020,…
Mainstream Renewable Power and Aker Offshore Wind have completed their acquisition of an 50% stake in an 800 MW floating offshore wind project in Japan being developed by Progression Energy. The deal was first announced in August last year, while financial terms remain undisclosed. Nordex will supply 314 MW of its wind turbines across two of Valorem’s wind farms in Finland. The projects are expected to enter construction within the next two months, with delivery expected in 2024. The US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has announced that it will hold an auction on May 11 for two lease areas offshore the Carolinas that could host up to 1,300 MW of offshore wind capacity. Orsted…
Vodafone has been going through significant structural changes at group level recently, to adapt to the requirements of modern software-based networks and service architectures. Its changes include the insourcing of many developer activities from partners to a new group-wide team, as well as significant changes to its procurement processes and personnel. Now the changes to internal and partner relationships are filtering down to country level also, particularly in the UK. Here, chief network officer Andrea Dona plans to create a “one tech team” culture to develop new partnerships and revenue streams, enabled by the move to more open networks. New revenues will only flow if Vodafone develops a new partner ecosystem, and that will only happen if legacy processes are…
As we have covered regularly, the video codec market is divided between several different standards and also several different patent pools, which creates considerable confusion about royalties, and about the consequent costs for makers of video devices – an increasing number of them mobile. With the recent confirmation of the VVC (Versatile Video Coding) royalty terms for the two patent pools Access Advance and MPEG LA, it is worth exploring the impact of these fees on the device market. It appears, based on volume pricing, that Sisvel’s AV1 is cheaper than AVC at small volumes for OEMs, and that Velos Media – the third HEVC licensing group – is wildly distorting the MPEG market. As the example scenario, our analyst…
Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone have signed a second MoU (memorandum of understanding) to expedite Open RAN development across Europe. This is the second release of a document originally published and signed in June 2021. “Release 1 focused on the main scenarios and technical requirements for each of the building blocks of a multivendor RAN. Release 2 builds on those requirements and focuses in particular on intelligence, orchestration, transport and cloud infrastructure, aiming at defining a fully automated and interoperable Open RAN system,” the partners said. “The energy efficiency requirements and targets to support sustainable Open RAN deployments have also been addressed. It is expected that Open RAN networks will gradually become more energy efficient than traditional RAN, benefiting…
After many twists and turns, the saga of Malaysia’s national wholesale 5G network seems to be coming to a conclusion, with the government finally winning the support of the country’s four major operators. The government has rejected the telcos’ calls to issue a second 5G wholesale licence, but it has made concessions to some of their concerns, which had led them to stay aloof from the plan to build a single 5G national network that all the MNOs would use, with the aim of reducing the cost and time to market for 5G services. A key concession is to allow the four MNOs to own up to 70% of the wholesale network owner and operator, Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), giving…
India is not only a top three market in terms of mobile subscribers, but one of the world’s most volatile in terms of market structure for operators and their suppliers. The entry of Reliance Jio, and the subsequent consolidation of other large MNOs, is still creating a ripple effect, intensified by steep rises in mobile usage, regulatory disputes about upcoming 5G spectrum auctions, and the ongoing financial pressures on the telcos. Following a particularly active few weeks, it seemed valuable to summarize some of the main recent developments, especially those that may move the goalposts for the operators, as they face the challenge of building out yet another network, for a market with high demand but low ARPU, and in…
The dream that the cloud-native 5G core would usher in open, multivendor networks in which new and small suppliers could take part is belied by the first deployments of 5G Standalone (SA), which requires the 5G core. Most major announced contracts, outside of the small number of greenfield operators, have gone to single suppliers, mainly the established equipment providers. HPE unveiled a full 5G core stack last year but has acknowledged that, in the macro networks, operators are remaining cautious and opting for their familiar suppliers – HPE will focus, for now at least, on enterprise and private networks, where there is a far more ready appetite for new solutions, and a wider range of deployers. There is some opening…
Japan’s second operator, KDDI, is less prominent than its rivals NTT Docomo and Rakuten Mobile in the discussion about radical new network architectures, but it tends to work away in the background in its own disruptive way, and occasionally surface with some interesting results. A few weeks ago it claimed that it had turned on the first 5G Standalone (SA) Open RAN cell site, and last week, it showcased a development that looked more significant, because it was a rare breakthrough in open networking that was outside the hyped-up RAN. As analyzed in today’s lead article, the targeted benefits of open multivendor platforms will be constrained if operators focus only on the RAN, especially as so many challenges still remain…
Special Report: Evolution of the 5G core Scarcely a week goes by without new headlines about Open RAN. It took center stage at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Last week, the five European operators that are collectively trying to drive regional Open RAN adoption and ecosystem signed their second memorandum of understanding, with a focus on energy efficiency and the next stage of specifications. NTT Docomo and Rakuten’s integration arm, Symphony, are playing ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ with their growing Open RAN ecosystems. But the most open and agile of RANs will not deliver all the targeted benefits of 5G if they are not combined with equally agile core networks, both in terms of the packet core…
Five years ago this week… TiVo revealed that Sky would be integrating its intelligent voice search into the Sky Q set top, a partnership that was indicative of the operator’s broadband-focused strategy. With a voice search button added to Sky’s Ruwido touch remote controls, users would be able to casually search for content with vague voice commands, as well as memorable script lines from certain movies. Rather than just a novelty feature, Sky was looking to get a foothold on voice functionality in the growing connected home market, which was dominated by Alexa at the time, and remains the case today. — Swiss streaming service Zattoo has released a trio of reports covering trends in its three markets of…
Nielsen has been shouting from the rooftops that it has rejected an acquisition offer which has valued the measurement monolith at around $15 billion. Disheartened by the low offer, Nielsen feels the best way to pick itself up off the floor is a wholly transparent PR stunt in which the pitiful price tag is supposedly spun into a sign of strength. ‘We are better than this’ is the overriding message of Nielsen’s statements regarding the acquisition, but unfortunately no posturing can save the harsh reality of the situation – the company is valued far below its own estimations. This is hardly surprising. Watching the industry sour against Nielsen over the past two years has been a painfully linear spectacle. There…
Low-latency video specialist Haivision has been inundated with questions from customers since signing a $23.2 million deal to acquire French broadcast contribution vendor Aviwest exactly a month ago. The funny part is that almost every single query through the door has been linked to that sexy three-letter acronym typically associated with Haivision. We are of course talking about SRT (Secure Reliable Transport), the open source streaming protocol pioneered by Haivision, which has changed the face of video delivery over unmanaged networks. You may be less familiar with another three-letter acronym, SST (Safe Stream Transport), which is Aviwest’s proprietary protocol for managing QoS over any unmanaged IP network, developed some 13 years ago when the first 3G networks appeared. The faux…
With the recent confirmation of the VVC (Versatile Video Coding) royalty terms for the two patent pools Access Advance and MPEG LA, it is worth exploring the impact of these fees on the video device marketplace – and what better way than abusing a spreadsheet? It appears, based on volume pricing, that Sisvel’s AV1 is cheaper than AVC at small volumes for OEMs, and that Velos Media – the third HEVC licensing group – is wildly distorting the MPEG market. As the example scenario, we chose to focus on a smartphone, and charted three different shipment scales – a small run of 3.5 million units, a medium run of 30 million, and a large run of 300 million. Plotting the…
Ahead of a likely Labor-Green coalition victory in the May elections, Australian fossil fuel investments have had their position strengthened by the West’s sanctions on Russian fuel exports. In March alone we have seen Esso Australia reach FID to the tune of $300 million USD concerning oil and gas platforms in the Bass Strait. The ruling Liberal Party is as supportive of fossil fuels as ever with a spate of gas infrastructure funding announcements in recent weeks – $38 million across seven projects in the North Territory, South Australia, and the east coast of the country. Once again the Liberal Party is pressuring regulators to go easy on fossil fuel companies even to an extent that may violate legal requirements…
Vodafone UK has worked with Ericsson to trial dynamic 5G Standalone (SA) network slicing, but the operator claims that net neutrality rules may limit the potential for commercial services. The trial used RAN slicing to deliver an on-demand 5G network slice for a virtual reality application. This required low latency and high bandwidth and achieved metrics of 12.4ms and 260Mbps respectively in a demonstration based in a retail store environment. The process of ordering a slice, through to provisioning and deploying it, took 30 minutes, the partners claim. Vodafone said this was the first test of its kind in the UK and expects customer proofs-of-concept (PoCs) to take place by the end of the year. It also believes other Vodafone…