A new subsea cable that will ensure Taiwan stays connected to the rest of the reason is being championed by US internet giants Google and .

Telecoms.com is launching a Digital Seminar Series in the autumn of 2021. As a valued reader we'd like your feedback on the top three topics of interest as listed below:

1. What’s next for 5G? What has gone right in 5G so far and what can be improved, key challenges to delivering on 5G promises, and if it’s time to start looking beyond 5G.

2. OpenRAN: Sifting through the hype What OpenRAN is and is not. Is it is able to play the role set out for it? Is it already too late for OpenRAN to feature strongly in 5G?

3. Is Balkanisation of the telecoms industry inevitable? Telecoms is heavily influenced by global geopolitics, especially the rivalry between the US and China. Do we all have to pick a side?

4. Has telecoms surrendered too much to the cloud? How should telecom operators strike a balance between the benefits of scale and flexibility of cloud and the control over their own lifeline?

5. The pros and cons of AI and automation for telcos - Is there such thing as too much automation, AI and machine learning for telecom operators? When and how should humans step in?

6. Will the high expectations for IoT ever be realised? How stakeholders can bridge the difference between promises and reality of IoT by making it more profitable and sustainable for CSPs?

7. Broadband best practice How to deliver broadband connection to households and businesses most efficiently & how to achieve synergy between fixed and wireless broadband solutions.

It is interesting, after writing in these pages for 20 years, reflecting on what sometimes grows from them! A year ago I wrote an article titled "The .

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

The Greening of Streaming, One Year On

It is interesting, after writing in these pages for 20 years, reflecting on what sometimes grows from them!

A year ago I wrote an article titled "The Greening of Streaming." I had, for the first time, decided to investigate the environmental and sustainability issues that face our industry sector. In my role as chair of the Content Delivery Summit, I also brought the topic to top of discussions in all three of the conferences over the past months, with a good reception and positive engagement. It was the first time at any CDN, telco, or streaming conference I had heard the topic addressed, and was impressed with the interest shown.

This is a topic that folks in our industry like to discuss, and there is a strong sense of aligned interest throughout our community. As I am finding myself increasingly saying, we only win on this issue if we ALL win.

Over the past year I've noticed numerous large actors in the industry begin to introduce formal statements on sustainability in their financial statements. This is a significant change from two years ago, when sustainability was really limited to the CFOs domain as a bottom-line cost in infrastructure provisioning.

Now companies not only want to ensure they are efficient from a pure power consumption point of view, but they increasingly want to be able to look shareholders, consumers, and (not least) family members in the eye and articulate responsible decision making around the sources of that power, the recycling and disposal of retired infrastructure, and where the traditional balance in optimization for price and performance has to now accommodate power and sustainability as a key consideration.

Is this simply a sign that large corporations are developing a sense of social responsibility?

Undeniably yes.

While there is often a portrayal of large industry actors disowning "problems that were not theirs," the modern streaming industry is, by and large, reasonably conscious that it has become one of the largest consumers of energy, and regardless of a typical company's focus on "maximising shareholder value," the people active in the company, and the company’s customers are all forcing a focus on environmental impact regardless of the company’s own strategic direction.

The corporate entity may be myopically focussed on its product/services functions, revenue and margin. But those who enable it to operate are collectively adopting a narrative that focuses on corporate social responsibility. In some ways there is nothing the company can do to prevent this attitudinal change. It is in practice a gradual cultural revolution.

And it's a good one!

There is nothing better than being able to deliver fantastic streams to vast audiences, and to be able to do so while reducing the sense of guilt that we are burning a hole in the planet.

When you combine all the internet infrastructure that enables streaming—and we acknowledge that this is shared by many applications of many kinds— the application of streaming creates one of the largest demands for compute and network capacity of all uses of the internet.

While bitcoin is currently a popular target for power-consumption criticism, streaming puts bitcoin mining to shame. While around a million GPUs were bought for crypto mining last year, there are literally billions of CPUs and GPUs distributed all over the internet—in laptops, smartphones, smart TVs, production facilities, clouds, and CDNs—all of them working to encode, deliver, and decode video.

Streaming is more familiar to the layperson than crypto mining. Crypto mining sounds bad, is always highlighted in "other" countries (appealing to visceral xenophobia), and frankly doesn't make any sense to any layman. And yet streaming really does...

In September, Nielsen will begin placing 3,000 new Portable People Meter Wearables in its pool of active PPM panelists. “PPM Wearables feature an .

In September, Nielsen will begin placing 3,000 new Portable People Meter Wearables in its pool of active PPM panelists.

“PPM Wearables feature an updated design that is smaller and more aligned with current wearable technology trends,” the research company said in the announcement.

“The new PPM Wearable comes in a variety of ways to wear including wristbands, clips and pendants, which are more appealing among demographics that typically have lower compliance. In addition, a new companion app will help improve communication, encourage participation and enable data transmission when the device is outside the home.”

It said the companion app will allow it to add features and adapt to technology trends more seamlessly.

The designs were first introduced in 2019 at the NAB Show. This week’s announcement was made by Mainak Mazumdar, Nielsen’s chief research and data officer.

The new PPMs are seen by Nielsen as providing “foundational support” for its work toward Nielsen One, a platform that it hopes someday will deliver “a single, deduplicated metric for media consumption” across TV, digital and audio, which includes radio.

There are about 60,000 active PPM panelists, so the first batch will be used by a subset of that population. The company said it will share top line findings in the second quarter of next year for the subset phase, and a full rollout of PPM Wearables in new panel households is planned for the second half of 2022.

“PPM Wearables have been through a series of rigorous tests and the system has performed very well in each phase,” it stated. “These tests included lab, focus group and dual-carry testing that measure how the wearables detect codes versus the current PPM among the same panelists.”

Portable People Meters are used by Nielsen in measuring audiences for audio, including radio, as well as local and national TV. First developed by Nielsen predecessor Arbitron, PPMs are carried by people in the Nielsen panels in larger markets to measure exposure to media.

[Related: “Nielsen Releases PPM Software Encoder for FMs”]

Subscribe

For more stories like this, and to keep up to date with all our market leading news, features and analysis, sign up to our newsletter here.

ITV could lose access to a substantial portion of the Freeview terrestrial platform after a rival bidder emerged for Multiplex A.The Telegraph .

ITV could lose access to a substantial portion of the Freeview terrestrial platform after a rival bidder emerged for Multiplex A.

The Telegraph reports a last-minute bid has emerged for the Multiplex run by the ITV-owned SDN. Should it be successful, the consortium has promised to make “substantial payments” to the treasury. It also says it would increase the number of HD channels available.

Rather than hold an auction, the government has proposed that SDN’s licence be “rolled over’ on current terms to allow ITV to continue its recovery after the pandemic. It would continue to pay to pay no licence fees for the Multiplex for the new 12-year term that begins in November 2022.

ITV acquired the Multiplex from S4C in November 2005 and has delivered he broadcaster with profits of £70 million per year. The Multiplex carries some of the commercial PSBs portfolio channels such as ITVBe and 5USA as well as other third-party commercial channels including QVC and Quest.

In all SDN carries around a quarter of the 100 available Freeview channels.

Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)

Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Related

A couple of weeks ago, the tech industry group Consumer Technology Association (CTA) released a predictably cheery report on the state of consumer technology. It forecasted record-breaking revenues of $487 billion this year, with laptops, wireless earbuds, personal fitness devices, and 5G phones singled out for especially strong growth.

Yet tucked into that upbeat forecast was a spot of dreariness: Smart home devices, once hailed as tech’s next big computing platform, would experience flat revenues of $15 billion in 2021, with unit sales up 11%.

The CTA says its stagnant forecast is merely a function of competition, as an influx of device makers drive down the cost of hardware. But as someone who’s been living with various smart home gadgets for several years now, I have a different theory: They’re just not worth a big investment unless you have a limitless supply of time and patience.

An airing of grievances

When you press a button on your phone—say, to make a phone call or take a photo—you probably expect that button to work every time. But that’s not the way things work with smart home devices.

Just this week, for instance, the two Alexa-connected blinds in my bedroom failed to roll down at their scheduled time, and this morning, only one of them opened back up again. I have no idea what went wrong, because Alexa doesn’t offer any feedback when things fail, so all I could do was try again until the routine triggered properly.

Those kinds of misfires are common in the smart home world. I’ve had Google Assistant refuse to set alarms or read upcoming calendar events for several days in a row, only to fix itself without explanation. My Ecobee thermostat occasionally gets stuck on a single temperature, requiring a reboot. I’ve had light bulbs inexplicably fail to connect to their hub device. And I’m pretty confident that every Echo speaker owner has experienced Alexa playing the wrong music at least once.

The problem, says Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi, is that smart home devices haven’t gotten much better at avoiding these problems even as the market edges toward mainstream users. Instead, a proliferation of new devices and use cases has multiplied the ways in which things to go wrong.

“At the beginning, you obviously had early adopters who usually have a higher level of patience,” she says. “But now that the market is somewhat mature, you’re not going to stand for that. You’re not going to be happy if you can’t rely on it. If your alarm doesn’t go off, there are consequences.”

Too many choices

Making sense of what to buy in the first place also brings its own challenges. Chaos reigns at every step in the smart home purchase process, and you can easily end up with a pile of devices that don’t work together. The SmartThings lights in my bedroom don’t work with Apple’s Siri assistant, and my Tilt blinds only work with Alexa. To control my Liftmaster garage door opener by voice, I must first connect it through a third-party service called IFTTT. The Philips Wiz smart bulb outside my office don’t work with Apple’s HomeKit system (though Philips’s separate Hue lighting brand does).

Even the relatively simple act of playing music across multiple smart speakers involves a mess of proprietary protocols. The Sonos Beam soundbar responds to voice commands from Google Assistant or Alexa, but only supports multi-room audio with other Sonos or Apple AirPlay speakers. To connect my soundbar with Google Home or Echo devices in other rooms, I’d have to plug a Chromecast or Fire TV (or both) into my television first.

A couple weeks ago, I also lost control of my SmartThings light bulbs entirely. That’s because Samsung decided to stop supporting a product it launched three years ago for turning Nvidia’s Shield TV streaming box into a SmartThings device hub. I’ve yet to set up the replacement hub that Samsung offered at a discount, because it requires pairing every bulb all over again. (Owners of Wink smart home hubs went throu...

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

The Greening of Streaming, One Year On

It is interesting, after writing in these pages for 20 years, reflecting on what sometimes grows from them!

A year ago I wrote an article titled "The Greening of Streaming." I had, for the first time, decided to investigate the environmental and sustainability issues that face our industry sector. In my role as chair of the Content Delivery Summit, I also brought the topic to top of discussions in all three of the conferences over the past months, with a good reception and positive engagement. It was the first time at any CDN, telco, or streaming conference I had heard the topic addressed, and was impressed with the interest shown.

This is a topic that folks in our industry like to discuss, and there is a strong sense of aligned interest throughout our community. As I am finding myself increasingly saying, we only win on this issue if we ALL win.

Over the past year I've noticed numerous large actors in the industry begin to introduce formal statements on sustainability in their financial statements. This is a significant change from two years ago, when sustainability was really limited to the CFOs domain as a bottom-line cost in infrastructure provisioning.

Now companies not only want to ensure they are efficient from a pure power consumption point of view, but they increasingly want to be able to look shareholders, consumers, and (not least) family members in the eye and articulate responsible decision making around the sources of that power, the recycling and disposal of retired infrastructure, and where the traditional balance in optimization for price and performance has to now accommodate power and sustainability as a key consideration.

Is this simply a sign that large corporations are developing a sense of social responsibility?

Undeniably yes.

While there is often a portrayal of large industry actors disowning "problems that were not theirs," the modern streaming industry is, by and large, reasonably conscious that it has become one of the largest consumers of energy, and regardless of a typical company's focus on "maximising shareholder value," the people active in the company, and the company’s customers are all forcing a focus on environmental impact regardless of the company’s own strategic direction.

The corporate entity may be myopically focussed on its product/services functions, revenue and margin. But those who enable it to operate are collectively adopting a narrative that focuses on corporate social responsibility. In some ways there is nothing the company can do to prevent this attitudinal change. It is in practice a gradual cultural revolution.

And it's a good one!

There is nothing better than being able to deliver fantastic streams to vast audiences, and to be able to do so while reducing the sense of guilt that we are burning a hole in the planet.

When you combine all the internet infrastructure that enables streaming—and we acknowledge that this is shared by many applications of many kinds— the application of streaming creates one of the largest demands for compute and network capacity of all uses of the internet.

While bitcoin is currently a popular target for power-consumption criticism, streaming puts bitcoin mining to shame. While around a million GPUs were bought for crypto mining last year, there are literally billions of CPUs and GPUs distributed all over the internet—in laptops, smartphones, smart TVs, production facilities, clouds, and CDNs—all of them working to encode, deliver, and decode video.

Streaming is more familiar to the layperson than crypto mining. Crypto mining sounds bad, is always highlighted in "other" countries (appealing to visceral xenophobia), and frankly doesn't make any sense to any layman. And yet streaming really does make sense. It has become a way of life for so many, especially this past year.

It is for this reason that the loudest criticisms concerning power cons...

Greening of Streaming: Focussing on Sustainability in Streaming.

With the massive uplift in streaming consumption there is far more awareness of streaming services and the impact of these services on the planet.

Greening of Streaming has been created to raise awareness of the issues, spread best practice and provide a voice to wider stakeholders and external observers of the industry.

It will be prepared to hold a mirror up for its members to reflect on their own practices and see how they could improve.

We are delighted to have Adam Curwin join full time as Executive Director to provide impetus and energy to the process. Adam has a background in ecology through “big accountancy” all the way through to heading up EDF’s Green Energy product suite, so he is very familiar with the ins and outs of power generation and consumption. Deliberately he is something of a streaming outsider, but is already very familiar with many of our challenges.

Call to Action:

We would love you to join us on this journey - and indeed, as an early adopter, to help define its direction.

To explain more, we are inviting organisations who we think might be interested as prospective members to attend an open initial Greening of Streaming meeting online on 9th September 2021 in which we will:

Lay out in detail the principles of the organisation

Present our mission statement and an initial draft of the Greening of Streaming statement of intent

Hear from Dr Daniel Schien from Bristol University, whose research focuses on the complex system of interactions between use of ICT services, use of infrastructure and design of ICT services - We have invited him to help our sector begin to frame some lexicon, and common terms of reference to better enable us to discuss key issues around sustainability and streaming.

We will also hear from two of the largest infrastructure providers to the streaming sector:

Akamai, on some of the challenges they face and how they have been approaching their response.

Intel, who are dealing with a number of different yet equally impacting sustainability issues in their own sector.

We are inviting further short presentations from attendees - see below if you would like to contribute!

This initial meeting is there to gauge interest and steer the organisation’s direction.

To register for the event please do so here:

Please note: We are very interested to hear from prospective members who might have an interesting case study, or some best practice advice, or some views on strategies the industry could take together - we want to bring you into our events to hear what the important topics of the day are. If you are considering joining the event, and have some experience, insight and thought leadership to bring, please complete this form so we can try to include you in the formal programming:

Immediately following this initial event, we will be inviting attendees to become Founder Members; Founder Members being a title only offered up to the end of September. (Thereafter all new members will be ‘Full Members’ with all the same rights).

Naturally we would be delighted if your organisation were to become a Founder Member of Greening of Streaming!

To Infinity and Beyond (!)

After that we plan to start formal Member meetings in October (virtually) and to discuss topics already planned by Greening of Streaming including:

Commissioning papers around ‘state of the sector’ on energy usage

Representing the industry at trade events and in policy discussions

Setting up discussions with the relevant government bodies

Plus some details for operating:

Finalisation of statement of intent and draft

Confirmation of Chair / Steering Committee

Ratification of output for next quarterly meeting

Planning of Schedule for Greening of Streaming goals

Hear from a member on their greening activities and learnings

Discussion of next items to schedule for Greening of Streaming promotion

We expect to hold a formal launch event at the UK Parliament in mid November to:

En...

Studios used to play by the same rules. Now each seems to have its own strategy for handling windows and home platforms. A guide — for now.

This week, Paramount opens “Snake Eyes,” an origin story for their “G.I. Joe” franchise, and Universal debuts “Old,” M. Night Shyamalan’s graphic novel adaptation.

In theaters, that is. Unlike the recent “Space Jam: A New Legacy” (Warner Bros.) or “Black Widow” (Disney), these two won’t have immediate home availability.

Confused? You’re not alone. Uncertainty about home access to new releases is now another problem theaters face.

There’s no easy solution to this.

In the ancient times of February 2020, studio movies opened in theaters first, then were exclusive for at least 75 days before home release (streaming, video on demand, Blu-Rays/DVDs). That no longer exists. But what has sprung up is a patchwork quilt of options. And for the consumer, it can be tricky to discern.

Studios are brands of sorts, but they generate little public awareness in terms of release policies. And beyond this, unlike in the previous era of video/DVD et al. releases, the means of the post-theater delivery now can vary widely.

'Black Widow': Breaking Down How VFX Helped Bring a New Level of Grit and Emotion to the Action

At $16.5 Million, 'Old' News Isn't Good Enough for Box Office Recovery

Related

Every Episode of 'Rick and Morty,' Ranked

Sundance 2021 Deals: The Complete List of Festival Purchases

Adding to the morass, two distinct options exist, each usually exclusive at first (though this is changing). And the battle between them for dominance ranks close to that between studios and theaters as key to what the future holds. Add to that the big-money stakes battle among streaming companies to stand out.

Broadly speaking, two options exist. The first is Premium Video on Demand. PVOD titles are rentals or sometimes digital downloads (EST, electronic sell through) that are paid for as stand-alone items via cable or online platforms like Amazon, Vudu et al. with a standard price of $19.99 (it ranges higher and lower sometimes). Subscriber-based streamers such as Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max normally offer titles at no extra charge beyond the monthly or annual fee.

With revenues from these largely unreported — unlike with theater grosses — gauging success in part comes from seeing what actions studios take. At the moment, the best gauge of what is working is following studio decisions in choosing among their various home options.

At the moment, here’s how the major studios each handle home release:

Allen Fraser/Unive

Universal

When theaters closed last year, Universal immediately pushed their PVOD options. They transitioned just released films like “The Invisible Man,” “The Hunt,” as well as Focus Features’ “Emma” to PVOD by March 20. Then they released “Trolls World Tour” exclusively on PVOD instead of waiting for theaters, which started a trend with other studios doing the same via various platforms.

Before then, PVOD was mostly a two-week option ahead of standard ($5.99 price) release, which paralleled DVD/Blu-Ray retails availability. It started around the 75 day mark after release. But strong results, in the wake of the pandemic, led to Universal announcing they would henceforth release all films via some sort of PVOD option.

Initially in a deal with #1 exhibitor AMC, Universal agreed to release films on PVOD as early as 17 days after opening in theaters (31 if the first domestic weekend gross exceeded $50 million). This included some reduction of film rental terms and ability for some exhibitors with their own on-line platforms to provide these films themselves.

That has mostly been the pattern since (including for Focus Features, owned by Universal). It has included lucrative PVOD showings for “The Croods: A New Age,” “Promising Young Woman,” and “Nobody.”

One big exception though: The “Boss Baby” sequel showed up on Peacock, NBC Universal’s new streamer, free for subscribers the same day as it hit theate...

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Kaltura Valued at $1.24 Billion After IPO

Kaltura has been valued at $1.24 billion after floating on the NASDAQ, 15 years after launching. The enterprise video company, which is partner and competitor to web video tech like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, also raised $150 million to accelerate marketing and sales.

"This is a veteran company, and it's a marathon, not a hundred-meter sprint," said CEO Ron Yekutiel speaking to financial news site MENAFN.

Kaltura says its 2020 revenue was approximately $120 million, with revenue growth steadily accelerating, achieving 46% YoY growth in the first quarter of 2021.

The company says its estimated total addressable market is $55 billion.

The Israeli company, trading as KLTR, made an earlier proposal to IPO last April, but had to defer the offering because of the collapse in the global equity market, Yekutiel told MENAFN.

"The company is growing fast," Yekutiel said, who described the company's modular platform, as "like Lego for video: a variety of different products for different video purposes, such as teaching, or sales and marketing. The system uses every kind of video capability, real-time, live broadcast, on demand.

"The video revolution has just started," he added. "In most enterprises they are only scratching the surface of video's capabilities. The coronavirus accelerated the trend, and raised awareness, and budgets."

He said the firm had invested more in development than in marketing, until now.

"Now, from a position of strength, we will increase investment in marketing. The company also intends to expand in AI, to launch new products, and to enter new markets, among them remote medicine.

He cited Zoom and Teams as indirect competitors in the video collaboration market.

"We don't try to replace them in enterprises. With us, video is a means of learning, marketing, carrying out customer service—more integrated products with high connectivity in the enterprise. In many cases, content created on Zoom goes onto our platform, which manages all the video in the organization. And so, in the pandemic, as the use of Zoom increased, the use of Kaltura increased as well."

Kaltura was founded in 2006 by Yekutiel, Dr. Michal Tsur, Dr. Shay David, and Eran Eitam.

Subscribe Now. Current Issue. Past Issues.

Free

for qualified subscribers

For the ones that missed it: Akamai had a major outage yesterday. Just like it had an outage last month. Including the outages of Fastly and Cloudflare in June, these are some serious outages of several big CDNs in a short time frame. These outages have a serious impact on businesses, individuals, and even society in general. And we are not even talking about smaller outages or outages of less-known CDNs around the globe, the last two months. But of course outages like the ones of Akamai and Fastly get headlines being public companies and serving a lot of major customers across the globe who suffer from these outages.

Is this a big surprise it happened? To be honest: not really. As one person mentioned to me yesterday: no CDN is invincible. CDNs like the earlier mentioned Akamai and Fastly as well as the likes of Verizon Digital Media, Lumen Technologies, Cloudflare, Limelight Networks, and dozens of others all have one thing in common: complexity. Running a CDN, certainly at scale, is a very complex exercise. Even more so, as it works with a lot of external suppliers, partners, and actors and runs within the public internet domain. Is that an excuse to have a major outage? Certainly not, but it does give an indication that running a CDN is not easy and a sign that the CDN Industry needs a change with such a number of events in a row.

If one thing became clear in the last 2 months, it is that a big part of the public internet is depending on CDNs to ensure businesses and individuals can use the Internet as they normally do. People that have been in the CDN Industry have known for years what dependency this is, yet the general public only got notice of it recently due to the number of outages in a short time frame from different CDNs. Is that a bad thing that CDNs exist, the Internet is depending on them and the risk of them having outages? Absolutely not: without CDNs people around the globe would be having a less secure, slower, less scalable, and less predictable internet experience. It for sure outweighs that. Without CDNs we would not be enjoying the Internet as we use every day. CDNs are there for a reason.

What it does show, is how important CDNs, the technology behind them, as well as all suppliers, partners, and actors behind CDNs, are. It is just like your utilities to your home: you never think about them until for whatever reason they do not work, and you are confronted with the fact of dependency. Does that mean you all of a sudden start filtering rainwater or only rely on generators? No, you don't and neither do businesses. Businesses do have backup plans and if they really depend on it for it always to work (e.g. hospitals). They have arranged that they can immediately switch or work with multiple sources at the same time for redundancy reasons.

This is the same with every website that went dark if they have chosen to depend on a single CDN and that CDN has an outage (or Cloud, DNS-service, or any other single point of failure for that matter). If a business cannot afford to be offline, the business needs to work the same way as hospitals or any other critical businesses do in terms of utilities. Have a failover or multiple sources to choose from. A lot of businesses have not made this priority thus far, but I bet that a lot of them will be now.

There is only one big difference. Everybody understands how important your utilities are at home or at a (critical) business, yet only a small group of people really understand the importance of CDNs for the same. Even on what CDNs are and what they actually do. With the outages of Fastly and Akamai it became clear a lot of publications on the internet were not correctly stating what a CDN is, what the issues were or what had caused it stating wrong information, conclusions, or assumptions. Is this the fault of the ones that write it? In part, but also a lack of proper education of the CDN Industry in general.

The outages themselves also raise the question amongst indi...