Rebecca Day

Major sports broadcasters and platform providers such as Amazon could be the most significant threats to pay-TV providers’ retention of top sports rights and customers in a changing over-the-top market, Nagra reported Thursday. The vendor to MVPDs noted the array of top tech platforms experimenting in this area. “Sports have been a key driver of growth in pay-TV for more than two decades,” said Jon Watts, managing partner at consulting company MTM. He said the rise of sports OTT introduced competition and innovation to the market, “prompting traditional providers to adapt their pricing, packaging and overall value propositions to stay successful.” The supply of sports content is expanding significantly, with new sports OTT services and providers potentially reducing demand for pay TV, said Nagra. Limit the impact of sports streaming piracy by leveraging new anti-piracy technology and industry collaboration, “particularly as 5G begins to roll out,” the company recommended. Nagra’s analysis of 65 of the world’s top services shows mobile as the first priority for all players, with more than 90 percent of services on iOS and Android, followed by streaming devices such as Apple TV, Fire TV Stick, Roku and Chromecast. Smart TVs had the lowest priority for services; 36 percent were on Samsung and 30 percent on LG TVs. New aggregators are seeking distribution via traditional pay-TV bundles “with limited success, reflecting pay-TV’s lack of interest in tier-two and three sports,” it said.

Verizon solved a “conundrum” in the U.S. mobile industry in the first half by meeting consumers’ desire for “unfettered video consumption while maintaining a quality video experience,” OpenSignal reported Monday.

South Korea "is the first country to deploy proper 5G where you can really have it in many places,” unlike the U.S., where it’s still “very spotty,” said Greg Kustudia, Opensignal vice president-sales, Americas. Company research found 5G download speeds in Korea averaging 111.8 Mbps, 48 percent faster than users get with comparable 4G flagship phones and 134 percent faster than other 4G phones, blogged Ian Fogg, vice president-analysis. In the U.S., 5G peak downloads reached 1.2 Gbps, Fogg said Thursday, based on measurements from Verizon's network. The max in South Korea was 988 Mbps, 8.8 times as fast as user’s average real-world speeds of 111.8 Mbps. The U.S. has top speeds now because carriers here are using mmWave spectrum vs. the mid-band spectrum Korea uses, meaning Korea has a broader signal range but lower speeds, Fogg emailed us Friday. As vendors fix 5G “teething issues” and refine solutions, peak and average speeds will improve, he said. Some bands aren’t available in certain markets yet -- 3.5 GHz in the U.S. and mmWave in Europe, for example -- but “they will be over the next couple of years and learnings from other countries will help carriers improve these later 5G rollouts,” he said. The video experience promised for fifth-generation phones will be particularly important to measure for customers, a spokesperson said: “Is it buffering, what kind of video experience are you actually getting?” The company's app tries to turn “speeds and feeds” in the mobile “arms race” into metrics that nontechnical people can easily understand, said James Hayman, assistant vice president sales-North America. Opensignal used Pepcom's Digital Experience technology showcase in New York Thursday to demonstrate its mobile "analytics" app and to set expectations about 5G networks. Also last week, Sprint unveiled its third 5G phone (see 1906210062).

Dish Network, selling add-on audio and connected home products to pad its satellite TV installations for the past decade, is moving into a non-TV-centric business based on the connected home, Jeremy McCarty, general manager of the recently formed OnTech Smart Services brand, told us Monday. The service is launching in Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and St. Louis.

Broadcast TV transitioning to 4K will be a “matter of time,” and an evolution to 8K broadcasts is well off, said Sharp Home Electronics President Jim Sanduski. The in-home ecosystem required to handle increased bandwidth required for a fatter 8K signal is “evolving quite nicely” with the ratification of Wi-Fi 6 and with 5G on the horizon, he said at CE Week in New York Thursday. Samsung’s Andrew Sivori, vice president-TV product marketing, said a quarter of U.S. households today can handle 75 Mbps data speeds. That's the high end of what 8K transmissions will demand, he said. “That’s only going to get better and better over time," he said. Value Electronics President Robert Zohn is a proponent for over-the-air 4K and 8K content -- “as they do in Japan and South Korea.” Zohn said he’s been told by contacts in those industries that “when the TV manufacturers are ready, we’ll be ready." He cited ATSC 3.0 and the ability to deliver 8K content over the air, via IP or over the top, and spoke glowingly of the possibilities for sports via 8K broadcasts: “Can you imagine sports at 120 frames per second?" Zohn imagined the ability to have a replay of a wide-angle shot with digital zoom: “You can do that with 8K.” Tim Alessi, LG senior director-product marketing, downplayed the lack of available native 8K content. He compared that to early days of HDTV: “All of a sudden, boom, there it all was.”

Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant “routinely records and voiceprints millions of children without their consent or the consent of their parents,” alleged a class action complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Seattle Tuesday. It said the practice violates laws in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington that prohibit recording oral communications without the consent of all parties to the communication. Representing Massachusetts 10-year-old plaintiff C.O. through her guardian, Alison Hall-O’Neil, the suit seeks redress for all minors in those states who have used Alexa in their home. Echo and Echo Dot users expect that a digital query is sent over the internet for processing, that a digital response is returned and that the device then converts the response into Alexa’s voice, it said: Users don’t expect that “Alexa is creating and storing a permanent recording of their voice.” The lawsuit alleges Amazon could process audio interactions locally on an Echo device “and send only a digital query, rather than a voice recording,” to Amazon servers, saying it wouldn't be as cost effective “or commercially advantageous” to the company. Apple records communications in a similar manner to Alexa with its Siri voice assistant, but it stores the recordings in an “identifiable form” for only a short period of time, “and then deletes the recordings entirely,” said the complaint. Amazon didn’t comment Wednesday. It referred us to a blog post outlining the company’s approach to privacy and safety.

The May Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security notice banning shipments to Huawei will have “half a quarter impact” on Silicon Labs' Q2 revenue since the company’s late April guidance, said Chief Financial Officer John Hollister at a Tuesday investor conference. Hollister called Huawei a “3 percent customer” generating $6 million quarterly revenue in its infrastructure business. He pegged IoT revenue potential, the most robust part of the “opportunity pipeline,” at $8 billion, mostly in wireless. CEO Tyson Tuttle said Silicon Labs is “furthest along” among competitors in small-scale wireless-enabled devices, a market that could reach 80 billion-100 billion devices deployed by 2025. “If you just come in and do one chip or one piece of the software, you’re really missing the big story of what the opportunity is,” he said, pushing the company’s breadth in software and devices.

Universal Electronics Inc. CEO Paul Arling considered hypothetical solutions at a Tuesday investor conference in response to analyst questions on the company’s plans for manufacturing in light of the Trump administration’s plans to impose tariffs next week on goods brought in from Mexico. UEI was “a little surprised -- unpleasantly surprised” to hear of Donald Trump's plan for tariffs on goods imported from Mexico (see 1905310033) with the company in the midst of moving “a good percentage” of manufacturing from China to a facility in Monterrey, Mexico, Arling said. The company has historically produced goods such as remote controls in China, but it began last year shifting “nearly half of our units” out of China because “we do not wish to absorb a 25 percent increase; nor do our customers.” On how UEI plans to respond to Mexican imports, set to kick in at 5 percent Monday and rise incrementally to 25 percent in October, Arling said, “we’re going to play that by ear.” He referenced the company’s past efforts to find production locations “other than China,” listing the Philippines, where it has some operations, and Vietnam as options. It took six months to move from China to Mexico, Arling said. UEI looked at opening a factory in the U.S. “a few years back” but decided “you’d be so cost uncompetitive that you wouldn’t be able to compete -- you wouldn’t even be close on price,” Arling said.

Apple previewed iOS privacy and security features, independence for Apple Watch, and a first-time dedicated iPad operating system at its Monday Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. New features are expected to be available this fall.

The Zigbee Alliance is removing some optional pieces from the standard to improve interoperability among such smart home devices, Marketing Director Ann Olivo-Shaw told us Thursday. “We got to a point with connecting certain devices that our member companies were running into interoperability issues.” The “All Hubs Initiative” is driven by an alliance group of Amazon, Comcast, NXP, Osram, Silicon Labs and others, said last week's announcement. Olivo-Shaw said Samsung also was an important player. The alliance said IoT and smart home ecosystems “can vary in their supported features, business models, value propositions, customer experience expectations, security requirements, and other factors.” Such "flexibility can sometimes create challenges for device vendors trying to build and market products that meet the requirements of different ecosystems and earn their coveted 'Works With' badges -- and challenges for businesses and customers using those products across a number of hubs.”