Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Microsoft’s $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, one of the largest independent video game publishers, was something of a shock for the industry. The troubled firm, which is battling multiple internal crises and PR disasters, has a wealth of intellectual property, and Microsoft will want to bolster its Game Pass Xbox subscription services using it. While consolidation is continuing among the traditional vendors, new entrants could shake things up entirely, and Netflix has been making noises in recent quarters. Given that the largest games on the market are series of familiar IP, refreshed or tweaked on a near seasonal basis, the ability to craft games from popular video titles has not gone unnoticed. On its recent earnings call, Netflix CEO…
Rather than hear another bland sustainability script from some of the media industry’s most prolific carbon contributors, we sat down this week with a non-profit group boasting a decade’s experience committed solely to calculating the climate crisis. The mission is simple – how can we broach sustainability in content production if we can’t measure it? The organization will be a familiar one to UK dwellers, The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), best known for the annual awards ceremony of the same acronym. Hidden within BAFTA is a tiny eight-person team under the name albert, the carbon calculator which keen Faultline readers will recognize from last week’s sports broadcast production piece featuring Sky Sports, BT Sport and BBC…
When Faultline introduced the name MarketCast to readers in October 2020, we made a tongue-in-cheek reference to the US analytics firm’s antiquated survey-based research model for the media industry. In truth, surveys are simple and timeless as the basis for research, particularly when enhanced with more modern techniques, like the virtual audience analytics assets that MarketCast has just acquired from Boston-based Invoke this week. With Invoke, MarketCast inherits a cloud-based content testing system aiming to disrupt the traditional process of physically screening video content with viewers prior to release, with a platform allowing hundreds of viewers to participate in concept and episodic online screenings in real-time. It brings live chat and discussion features, supported by AI to interpret feedback, while…
Just as we were starting to get used to Vodafone’s common cloud-based video technology stack, the European operator’s Portuguese wing springs up with something different – deploying a new entertainment hub from Universal Electronics (UEI). We shouldn’t be too surprised, as Vodafone has always seemed to do its own thing with video in Portugal compared to elsewhere on the continent, with a pay TV platform built on legacy Mediaroom software, running on a DVR from Alcatel, and with a content discovery system backed by TiVo’s voice search. Back around 2015, when Kaltura was beginning to assert its influence all over Vodafone TV, it was clear the Portuguese system was not as easy to migrate to Kaltura and AWS as Vodafone’s…
While headlines this week laud Pacific Gas and Electric for its commitment to energy storage, it is mostly doing as it is told by the California Public Utilities Commission, which is showing increasing confidence these days as it accelerates its plans for energy storage on the CAISO grid. Because of the CPUC policies and a rising expectation behind energy storage, PG&E said it will be pushing forward 9 projects for a total of 1,600 MW of utility projects for its second tranche of investments into lithium ion energy storage. This is a marked improvement over plans that have been on file from 2018 through to 2022, which pointed to PG&E having just 2,288 MW by 2030 – that is now…
Worth Noting: Telefónica teams up with Grupo Alva for 5G IoT predictive analytics Telefónica Tech, the digital services arm of Telefónica, has hooked up with Spanish engineering services company Grupo Álava to develop and launch a predictive analytics package for Industry 4.0 applications, exploiting private 5G, cloud and edge computing, as well as big data analytics driven by machine learning algorithms. The new predictive analytics will allow industrial companies to digitize critical assets and maintenance processes with large-scale sensing and connectivity, according to the two companies. Telefónica added that 4G and 5G componentry will be available to enterprises as part of the predictive analytics offer on both private and public network infrastructure, with edge-based private LTE/5G networks built using “several…
The USA’s CTIA, which represents service providers, has decided the time is right to start testing 5G security recommendations in real world conditions, if not yet live commercial networks, by setting up a new and validation initiative. The recently established 5G Security Test Bed (STB) has emerged from CTIA’s Cybersecurity Working Group “to test 5G security recommendations across real world conditions using commercial-grade equipment and facilities”. The idea is to involve stakeholders, including operators, equipment makers, other technology providers and academia, so that they can ensure that real networks used by consumers and enterprises are robust against threats that have been identified, as well as being prepared for reducing impact of unforeseen attacks. Founding members have been drawn from these four…
Special Report: 5G in space This edition marks the 900th issue of Rethink Wireless Watch, and in the 18 years of industry analysis that represents, there has inevitably been a huge amount of change. Some concerns stay the same, of course. Trying to close the gap between the rise in mobile data consumption and the stagnation of ARPU remains a constant concern, for instance, and one that has only partially been addressed by 5G’s promise to support new revenue streams. Indeed, the slow adoption, so far, of the 5G core (see item below) – which enables many of those new revenues – highlights the gulf that always exists between new commercial opportunities and the complexity of the technology that…
Faultline made a pledge in the dying days of 2021, to increase our coverage of environmentally friendlier technologies and sustainable strategies in the video ecosystem. Our green lens has so far focused mainly on the video delivery pipe, while we would argue that more innovation is happening further back in the chain as broadcasters and production companies set the bar for carbon crunching. Attending an Accelerator Project showcase this week from IBC365, the community platform arm of the Amsterdam tradeshow organization, we learned all about a recent collaborative project in which UK media rivals Sky Sports, BT Sport and BBC Sport have broken bread for the good of sustainability. Opening gambits don’t come much cheesier than that, and of course…
Livepeer CEO Doug Petkanics has finished popping champagne after his company’s latest $20 million funding round and is back in the driving seat to set the record straight with Faultline. Our angle last week is that Livepeer is likely going to funnel these latest funds into growing its core distributed transcoding platform, rather than pursuing pastures new like the scene classification technology that we know the company was planning to launch. It turns out we weren’t far off the money, as Petkanics admits to us, “To be honest, the areas of investment and progress haven’t mirrored the aspirational roadmap perfectly.” He confirmed that the “promising” scene classification feature remains in pilot, to support streaming platforms scaling up by identifying stream…
Reports in the Italian press say that the country’s media regulator, Agcom, is on the verge of mandating that OTT streaming platforms begin measuring and reporting the quality of the service they provide. This is the beginning of what looks like a messy dispute between the streaming platforms and the ISPs that have to deliver that traffic to customers. This is the ISPs’ collective attempt to avoid the ire of their broadband customers. The proposed rule would ‘prove’ that an outage was the fault of the OTT service, and not the ISP, and therefore let the ISP off the hook – with the OTT service then forced to refund its customers some $8.50 (€7.50) per week that the QoS has…
Faultline could be found in long-lost territory this week, seated non-virtually in the audience of an intimate technology talk event. Conscious that the subject matter of this Bristol-based basement show might lie a little outside our usual remit, we arrived with modest expectations (and one of our smaller notepads) – so we couldn’t quite believe our luck when proceedings were opened by a voice tech start-up that felt strangely familiar. “This is a world-first for buying a physical product directly from an audio ad,” declared Charles Cadbury, CEO at London-based Say It Now, following a video clip demonstrating an actionable audio ad being summoned to purchase Berocca (a popular dissolvable multivitamin) via simple voice commands to an Amazon smart speaker.…
Oil Prices have hit seven-year highs this week, as fear grows among traders that demand will outstrip supply later this year. Hitting $89 per barrel on Tuesday, Brent Crude is being driven up by a slow return to pre-pandemic production rates from OPEC+ members, many of which are lacking resources to get oil production infrastructure back up and running. Total spare capacity among members was forecast to reach “historically low levels” of about 1.2 million barrels per day this summer, according to Goldman Sachs. Capacity concerns have been compounded by supply disruptions in Libya, as well as a drone attack on Monday near an oil depot in the UAE by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Australia’s Fortescue Metals Group – one of…
RWE has completed the installation of its 860 MW Triton Knoll offshore wind farm in the UK’s North Sea. The US Environmental Protection Agency has issued the final air permit for the 130 MW South Fork Wind offshore wind farm in the Rhode Island-Massachusetts Wind Energy Area, USA. The project, which is being developed by Orsted and Eversource Energy, is slated for operation in 2023. Orsted and Korea Southern Power have teamed up to explore the possibility of developing the 800 MW Incheon offshore wind farm off South Korea. German TSOs TenneT and 50Hertz have teamed up for the first time in their history to transport 4 GW of offshore wind power generated in the North Sea into the German…
Population: 37.13 million (+1.2% vs 2020) GDP per Capita (PPP): $7,360 (+0.9% vs 2020) Debt to GDP: 76.6% (+1.2% vs 2019) Power Per Capita: 765 kWh Fossil fuel subsidies cut, CSP leader At the end of 2020 Morocco had 1.4 GW of wind power installed, 530 MW of CSP, and just 220 MW of photovoltaic solar, meaning total solar has attained only a third of its old 2020 target. Together with hydropower at 1.77 GW and 465 MW of pumped hydro the country already has a significant amount of clean energy – 3950 GW out of a total of over 10 GW. The rest of the power is mostly coal, relying on Russian imports, with a small amount of natural…
Hydrogen’s worldwide economic explosion will prompt one of the largest shakedowns in energy history, according to a new report from Rethink Energy. Hydrogen will provide a last-gasp opportunity to decarbonize 25% of all energy consumption. As more taxation is applied to carbon emissions, the rise in hydrogen production capacity will see it become the most cost-effective means of energy supply to sectors in all corners of demand. The company’s latest report, entitled Hydrogen to clean up energy with $10 trillion spend, provides a global forecast of hydrogen demand through to 2050, with figures provided across 21 key countries and 14 different sectors across the economy. By the middle of the century, total investment of $10 trillion will have seen the…
“The open source winds are blowing,” declared Conny Franzen, CEO of Swedish broadband CPE provider Inteno Group. A developer of hardware-agnostic open source operating systems for residential gateways, through its software subsidiary iopsys, Inteno is seeing ISPs warming to the open source model at last. In an interview with Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline, last week, Franzen said that BT is a customer of the iopsys open source software developers’ kit, based on OpenWrt, for platform-independent gateway software. Inteno was also one of the first contributors to the venerated prpl open source effort, which has just released its prplOS v2 software reference platform. Driven by non-profit group Software in Public Interest, OpenWrt is an open source embedded operating…
The ATSC standards for digital TV transmission are heavily associated with the USA and South Korea, but there are ambitions for the third generation of the specs to be positioned as a more global platform for hybrid video delivery, supporting mobile-first as well as terrestrial and satellite models. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Madeleine Noland, president of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), was pushing the idea of global ATSC 3.0, noting that Jamaica was the most recent country to adopt the standard. The Caribbean island nation is effectively skipping the first generation of digital TV and going straight to NextGen TV, she said, with Television Jamaica (TVJ) becoming a full ATSC member in the process. On…
Shifting tectonic plates in the automotive industry are attracting new vendors and disrupting established channels of collaboration and distribution. This has led to jostling for position among the big technology players in recent years, including telco equipment makers as they seek to establish their footing in a sector increasing dominated by data analytics and wireless communications in the erratic march towards autonomous driving and domination by electric vehicles (EVs). Huawei and Samsung have most recently exposed the turbulence they have been experiencing with significant recasting of their strategies. For Huawei, teething troubles have resulted from failure of Chinese automaker partner Seres, with the first model jointly produced, the SF5, having to be replaced by a later EV, after suffering…
Microsoft may not have not been correct to describe taking over AT&T’s mobile network and 5G core as a unique step for the cellular industry, but it certainly raised questions over the wisdom of tier 1 operators becoming over-dependent on the big technology houses. This after all came at a time when many operators were seeking to avoid becoming too reliant on Ericsson and Nokia for the RAN, so such a move suggested that the core might be moving in the opposite direction. That partnership, struck in June 2021, will see AT&T’s mobile core network transferred to run on Microsoft’s Azure for Operators. Although US mobile new entrant Dish is putting some of its core and RAN functions in…