The pod is delighted to welcome back media technology Analyst Ed Barton this week. Following a refreshingly short preamble, they get straight into Ed’s area of expertise, which includes tangents onto video streaming, social media and AI Armageddon. They then reflect on a day out Iain and Scott had with Rakuten Symphony before concluding by reviewing Huawei’s recent annual report.
The main pan-European communications regulatory group has found no evidence that calls to make big tech companies pay towards the cost of telecoms networks are justified.
Amdocs surveyed people in the UK who planned to watch the 2022 World Cup, and claims that 62% expressed interest in using the metaverse to be part of a virtual stadium.
Following the renewed plea by European operators for video streamers to contribute to the cost of telecoms infrastructure, Google delivered a riposte.
The CEOs of all the major European operators have signed a letter that once more calls upon the EU to get the biggest data traffic generators pay extra.
US ISPs Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Comcast are being sued by media production companies over what they see as a failure to stop illegal movie downloads, reportedly.
Swedish kit vendor Ericsson estimates 70 million 5G subscriptions were added in Q2 2022, bringing the total figure up to almost 700 million.
New research predicts the number of global online video subscriptions will exceed 2 billion, and the number of pay TV subscriptions will ‘still’ be 1 billion in 2027, though Netflix expected to lose 2 million customers in Q2 2022.
Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta TV service has opted to migrate its back-end platform to Comcast’s Cloud TV Suite (CTS).
UK telco group BT used the Gallagher Premiership Rugby match between Saracens v Northampton Saints as a showcase for an understated but practical sounding bit of private 5G.
No guest this week but we do have a special member of the audience this as the Telecoms.com empire continues to grow. The guys start by looking at BT’s latest attempt to rescue its sport division and what that says about telcos betting on content. They move on to ponder the matter of how useful millimetre wave spectrum is before concluding with a look at the effect Russia sanctions are having on the industry.
A report claims 5G will unlock new opportunities for video technology, such as improved VR that doesn’t cause nausea and broadcasting applications that ditch the wires.
UK converged operator VMO2 has launched a device called Stream for its broadband customers, which aggregates content from multiple TV services and allows billing for them to be controlled in one place.
The lads are delighted to welcome special guest Neil McRae to the pod this week, who is no less than the Chief Architect for BT. They start by exploring what such a grown-up job title entails, in the process learning a fair bit about what makes BT tick from a strategic point of view. That naturally leads onto topics like Open RAN and 5G, including concerns about the latter not being all its cracked up to be, before they conclude with a look at difficulties faced by some major streaming services.
The failure of CNN+ and the establishment panic over Elon Musk’s attempt to acquire Twitter are related events.
The streaming services blames password sharing, inflation the Russia-Ukraine war and inflation for a 200,000 drop in subscribers in Q1, as shares plummet around 25%.
New research has revealed that the number of UK homes paying for streaming services fell in Q1 2022, with 1.5 million total cancellations in that period.
Talk of a merger between DirecTV and Dish has resurfaced once again, but this time the broader market conditions could make such a move more likely to get regulatory approval.
UK operator group Virgin Media O2 has published the numbers on the use of its networks this year and revealed we downloaded more than ever.
Like most other sectors of life, sport has come a long way in using technology to support human decision making.
