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ABI Research Blog (96)

VOD Advertising Interoperability Takes a Step Forward

Feb 7, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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CableLabs recently completed an Ad Interoperability Event, with Canoe Ventures, BlackArrow, Avail-TVN, Harris, Nagra/OpenTV, SeaChange and This Technology participating. Additional details are available at: http://cablelabs.com/news/pr/2012/12_pr_Adv_Ad_Interop_020612.html

This event, designed to test out the SCTE 130 Ad Decision Manager (ADM) / Ad ​Decision Server (ADS) interface, will help operators to have confidence in building systems with hardware and software components from multiple vendors. Notably absent from the event were Ericsson and Motorola, who had participated in previous SCTE 130 events.

Comcast (working with BlackArrow)has already been rolling VOD Ads in most of its footprint. Other operators have begun limited trials, using a single vendor to avoid interoperability issues or testing the solution in-house prior to launch.

For more details on these players roles in Advanced Advertising please see: http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1005968-Advanced+Advertising+Technologies+for+Pay-TV+Platforms

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Verizon and Coinstar join forces to launch new subscription service

Feb 6, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Verizon and Coinstar announced a joint venture today (65% Verizon/35% Coinstar) to launch a national video service with physical and digital delivery. While few details are currently available, it will be primarily subscription based. We suspect the business model will mirror that which Netflix abandoned – unlimited streaming access to long-tail content with a few Redbox rentals per month. This type of service will compete with Netflix as well as Dish/Blockbuster, Amazon Prime, etc. We expect each partner will have the opportunity to cross-sell its products; Coinstar/Redbox will gain mindshare among those consumers who have taken to streaming video services and Verizon will gain an avenue for growing its video footprint nationally – an important step given the limitation of its FiOS expansion. With its content relationships, Verizon may be able to help Redbox customers access newer titles (e.g. before the 28 day window delay for some new releases). Regardless, it can help solve two key limitations of Redbox – first, its inability to deliver long tail content, and second, its inability to deliver instant gratification.
It is unclear at this time how consumers will interface with the service. Just how integrated will Redbox and Verizon (either Verizon Mobile or Verizon FiOS) be? If the rental systems are well integrated then a user could ostensibly reserve a video at a Redbox kiosk via Verizon’s VOD storefront on FiOS or on a mobile phone. The joint venture is expected to gain access (through Verizon’s Digital Media Services group, VDMS) to some of Verizon’s great device support coming from both mobile and FiOS’s FlexView platforms – including support for XBOX, Apple’s iOS devices, and Android devices.

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On Facebook and Mobile Advertising

Feb 6, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Facebook has a longstanding problem of making money out of it's mobile platform. It goes something like this;

* Facebook is funded from advertising revenue

* Targeted advertising on Facebook is very alluring and companies are happy to pay for it

* Facebook has 845 million active users that advertisements can be served to

* More than half (425 million to be exact) access the site via a mobile device

* Facebook does not serve advertising over mobile device


You can easily see how that's a huge problem for the bottom line of the company and it was made clear in the IPO announcement that Facebook is working to address the problem. However, serving advertisements to mobile users across multiple mobile operating systems and multiple App Stores is a formidable challenge in itself. There is no denying that the iTunes Store is very particular about the advertising that is allowed and that does not bode well will Facebook. After all, in Facebook's balance sheets there is no space for an iTunes tax and there never will be.

On top of that, Microsoft is slowly proving to the as tyrannical as Apple has ever been about their App Store. In essence, Facebook needs a map to a potential mine field and needs it fast.


Here's an interesting development from the new age giant that might provide a bit of an insight into the future revenue stream. TechCrunch, recently published an article about application bookmarks in the newsfeed. What it essentially does, is it allows you to see quick links to applications that you use a lot. It's all great and the point that Josh Constantine makes is right on the money but here's something else.


With recent additions to the Facebook platform, you can now share with friends what it is that you are doing but essentially what you are doing is advertising the content provider of your activity. So how valuable do you think that is? I'd say extremely and the advertising industry know that. In fact, it is no secret that recommendations from friends are one of the most effective advertisements that you can ever get and word of mouth is the Mecca of the advertising business. Can you do this on a large scale? Not so much, at least not until now. Think about it this way, Facebook has the means of charging companies based on word of mouth advertising. You share a company's name with your friends, Facebook gets money. You add an application to your favourites, Facebook gets even more money. And you as the user, never get to see any annoying banners and yet you are the driving force behind the largest advertising agency in the world.


Yeah, I know, it's maybe a bit Utopian and a bit ambitious but if I wake up tomorrow to a world like this it would be no surprise at all. Facebook has in fact provided brands with a new advertising medium and they will be allowed to charge for it. You on the other hand can do exactly what you've always done and tell all your friends about the brands and products that you feel passionate about. And companies actually get to compete on a levelled field provided that they have the entrance fee. And if you have doubts as to will this ever work and why should brands pay for it ... look at what Twitter is thinking of making money from.​​

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Skies look clear for Aakash2

Feb 2, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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​The latest dispute between Datawind, the makers of “Aakash” and IIT Rajasthan, a premier educational institution, which was the procurement agency for “Aakash” has come to an end with the Indian government taking matters in its own hands and taking away not only procurement responsibility but also drafting of specifications from IIT and giving it to the department of IT. The procurement responsibility will now be given to public sector undertakings.

The main bone of contention between the manufacturer and the institution was the tablet specification. Both the parties had not been able to agree upon a required set of features for Aakash. While the IIT demanded a shockproof and rainproof tablet, Datawind refused to comply with the “military specifications” prescribed by the IIT saying manufacturing such a rugged tablet would push the cost to $1500 per tablet. The IIT team rejected the first 3000 tablets and also withhold the payment of the 10000 units supplied. Datawind in turn stopped the supply of tablets leading to delay in the availability of the tablet to students.

The new specification for Aakash2, the revised version of the tablet, is likely to include a capacitive touch screen and 1GHz processor. As per the latest update from the human resources development ministry of India, they will require additional 220 million tablets and would engage multiple vendors to manufacture the tablet. Datawind which currently has an order of 100,000 devices is expected the release the upgraded Aakash2 devices soon.

With things turning favourable for Datawind after Indian government’s intervention, the path ahead for Aakash2 now looks smooth.​

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Intel the Underdog

Feb 1, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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As Intel enter the smartphone market with design wins at Motorola, Lenovo and China Unicom for x86 based applications processors they are up against the combined might of ARM licensees already entrenched in the market.

Whilst Qualcomm, TI, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. are relatively small semiconductor suppliers compared with Intel overall their combined might and solid market position make them a formidable force to be reckoned with.


This battle is just one exciting development in the mobile device IC market that will make 2012 a very interesting year.

More insight here ....

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CES 2012 and Home Automation

Jan 18, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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​CES 2012 was notable for the shift taking place in the home automation booths and displays. In years past, there was a growing crescendo of home automation activity, as represented by the growing numbers of home automation-specific vendors and the growing size of the floor space devoted specifically to M2M. The wave seems to have crested: Control4, which had in previous years served as a key anchor-tenant, providing a huge venue for a large number of its key partners, stayed off the show floor this year. The ZigBee, Z-Wave, and HomePlug Powerline Alliance booths all seemed smaller this year, with fewer companies (and fewer varieties of applications) on display.

(Note: I was contacted by the ZigBee Alliance on 2/1/12 in response to this blog post and provided with the following clarification: "The ZigBee Alliance pavilion actually had more ZigBee Certified products on display than last year, was the same physical size/number of member pods as the past two years, and had the same applications as last year.")

These should not necessarily be taken as a warning sign for the home automation industry in general, however, which continues to grow at remarkable rates. Rather, this year’s CES highlights the growing maturity of the overall home automation market. Control4 met with its customers and partners in suites off the show floor – it likely feels less need to create market awareness either for itself or the home automation market, given the company’s overall growth. Likewise, while home automation-specific companies and floor space may have declined, there was much more evidence of “monitoring and control” technologies being integrated into a wide variety of home systems and devices, such a door locks from Schlage and dishwashers from LG. Essentially, we’re moving from a specialized market with its own area of the show floor, to a more mainstream technology embedded into products and services all throughout the show floor.

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Of Fantasy Hockey and Why Everybody's Suddenly Doing APIs

Jan 17, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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​If you aren’t yet fully acquainted with the concept of fantasy sports, it may not be entirely your fault. Most of us enthusiasts feel that as a pastime it’s still somewhat too stigmatizing to be announced during a dinner party, or at least before the occasion has progressed to the digestif. (Although calling it “Dungeons and Dragons for jocks”, as some outsiders seem to do, is a little unnecessary.) It is one of those digital sub-cultures that in some form has existed for several decades, but which started to grow seriously only when broadband accesses had become commonplace.And by now it has grown to an extent that as an industry it generates today about$5 billion in revenue.

Surprised? So was I when I read that. Enlightened, I finally realized that outside of our own fantasy-hockey cave there’s a whole valley of similar dimly-lit caves, inhabited by similarly fixated dwellers.

Interestingly,CBS, one of the industry’s biggest players (the companies that essentially provide the users with the template to set up and run a league, and then a statistical engine to feed numbers into it), has decided to launch an API to third-party developers. And furthermore, it will also open a storefront through which the developers can distribute the apps they come up with.

That is promising. Fantasy sports is a numbers game, so there is a natural demand for various tools that allow you to better evaluate and track the players’ performance. The Internet is half-full of sites that offeropinionsandanalysison the recent moves and related topics, but since each fantasy pool tends to be different, in terms of rules and stats categories that are used to calculate the scores, they can seldom address all needs that individual participants may have. For example, our league has blocked shots as one of its eleven scoring categories; blocked shots however aren’t yet a regular category in most other leagues, so we have to take a lot of the existing player rankings and analyses with a good pinch of salt. Having an app whose player-ranking algorithms could better address the peculiarities of each different league would remove much of the guesswork involved in evaluating players.

As such, CBS is a prime example of why everybody's doing APIs in the first place. They allow differentiating and improving the product/service with someone else doing most of the hard work.The successful third parties may also generate substantial revenue for the partner platform, but that doesn’t change the fact that their biggest value is in making things better for the end-user.​​

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Visual Augmented Reality - Enterprise Security

Jan 14, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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At CES, I witnessed some interesting uses of visual augmented reality. Objects in a camera viewer were animated and overlayed onto the view of a tablet or smartphone. This type of AR could provide new ways for manufacturing and field services organizations to create and fix products.

But it also highlights how digitization of the enterprise also increases the threats. There is a lot of effort now in digitizing enterprise content to remove updating paper manuals. This digitization effort will eventually use more augmented reality technologies and applications. Once digitized, nefarious sorts could alter the digital information - such as install the wrongpart in an aircraft engine instead of another - you can imagine the consequences.

The question becomes how sophisticated are those inindustrial espionage​ to hack and alter visual information - images or even videos. My guess is that this would be hard and a hacker would rather simply alter text. Regardless, greater digitization offers more opportunities for security attacks. And it also highlights that some forms of digitization may be preferred over others to guard content and its potential alteration. Bottomline, AR provides new opportunities but will also introduce new challenges.

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Scoopshot, AT&T Video Capture and Crowdsourced Journalism

Jan 10, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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​How journalism adapts to the digital era is one of this decade’s big questions. More and more of the content has to be real-time, constantly updated, and at the same time more or less everyone is covering more or less everything so differentiation is increasingly difficult. And yes, the money is tight.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to two mobile innovations that could benefit an agile news organization.They won’t singlehandedly rescue a struggling media house, but could well help it doing more for less money.

Scoopshot is a photo app to connect media and journalists with the app users who have original photographs about an event of interest. The users can contribute to stories and earn cash, while the media can generate richer, and more recent, visual content without much of an extra investment – and to a more engaged audience. Currently Scoopshot is specifically a photo app, but enabling support for crowdsourced video clips would be a very natural addition.

Another example is AT&T’s and its new Video Capture, a video-sharing service aimed at businesses. The most typical use case might involve e.g. a field engineer assigned to fix broken machinery asking for further instructions from a back-office expert, but it could be also used for instance by a journalist to deliver fresh video content from a live case without a camera crew. Although Video Capture has started off as an enterprise service, it wouldn’t be a huge stretch of imagination to extend it to consumer-to-business use. Besides equipping their own staff with it, media organizations could then also apply it to various crowdsourcing assignments to collect video material.

Having more advanced smartphones will mean higher-quality photo and video content, and having more extensive 4G networkswill mean that such content can be delivered on to someone else if not anytime, anywhere then at least most of the time, in most of the places. It’ll be then up to the media industry to createpractices to make most out ofthis new, and rather potent,source of citizen journalism.

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Mindspeed acquisition of picoChip marks significant turning point for femtocell-era

Jan 9, 2012 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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​Mindspeed’s $76.8m acquisition ofbaseband chipset maker picoChip is significant and marks the true transition from what could be called as the ‘femtocell-era’ into what is being referred to as the small cell revolution. 2011 was the year when the term ‘small cells’ emerged, mostly seen as an umbrella term under which femtocells, picocells, microcells and even Wi-Fi could be categorized. Small cells were the flavor of Mobile World Congress 2011, and are expected to gain further prominence in 2012. ‘Het Nets’ or heterogeneous networks have become commonplace terms referring to the use of disparate technologies including small cells, compact base stations and traditional macro cells to solve the growing imbalance of network capacity and smartphone/tablet driven data demand.

picoChip has been a pioneer in the femtocell space with close to 70% market share (ABI Research estimates) for HSPA/WCDMA femtocells in 2011. picoChip’s closest rival Percello was bought out by Broadcom in 2010, leaving picoChip as a suitable acquisition target. While the femtocell market (indoor residential and enterprise) continues to grow, albeit at a smaller pace than expected, picoChip has been looking beyond indoor femtocells launching solutions catering towards the metro/rural outdoor small cell space. Mindspeed has largely been focused on LTE outdoor small cells. In our latest report card for the 2011 femtocell market, we did point towards the growing segregation of the femtocell and small cell chipset markets, and the market being ripe for consolidation.

The coming together of Mindspeed and picoChip does re-emphasize the importance of small cells as a technology enabler in future networks, also points to the fact that companies like picoChip have grown beyond the femtocell sphere and are moving to the next level, which is the looking at the larger small cell opportunity. They now will be able to truly compete in size and scale with the likes of Texas Instruments and Freescale who are forging ahead in that space. Broadcom and Qualcomm, two of the other baseband chipset providers who are still seen as largely indoor femtocell focused need to pull their socks up if they are to successfully compete, especially around LTE outdoor small cells where majority of market activity is currently focused.

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