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What does it take to succeed in Africa?
With Bharti’s acquisition of Zain Africa now agreed by the two parties, it’s a good moment to look at how to operate successfully in Africa. Read more »
Bharti books its passage to Africa
One era ends and another begins.
Last night Zain agreed to sell its Zain Africa unit to India’s Bharti Airtel, marking Zain’s departure from sub-Saharan Africa and Bharti’s arrival on the continent.
Swisscom closure is another nail in the coffin for DVB-H
Swisscom Mobile’s decision to pull the plug on its DVB-H broadcast-mobile-TV service is the latest in a series of setbacks for DVB-H in Europe, of which the most prominent are its aborted launch in Germany in 2008 and its failure to get off the ground in France last year. Read more »
4G, mobile broadband and emerging devices key at CTIA Wireless 2010
4G, mobile broadband and emerging devices were the key themes at CTIA Wireless 2010, held April 23-25 in Las Vegas, US.
Although LTE and Mobile WiMAX may not be true 4G, as defined by the ITU, they are close enough as far as most in the mobile industry are concerned. In any case the US is leading the charge and will be the dominant 4G market through 2014, when it will account for 31% of the world’s 4G subscribers, far ahead of the next-largest markets of Japan and China.
IPTV’s uneasy alliance with OTT video
One aspect of the IPTV World Forum which was perhaps surprising and completely unsurprising at the same time is how little of the event was developed to pure IPTV. Sky, Opera and UK online video start-up Blinkbox are just three of the names on the agenda who have relatively little to do with IPTV as it has historically (can the word historic be used for a technology that has been comercailly available for under ten years) been known. Opera, of course, is part of the Open IPTV Forum, but is at the event launching its HbbTV solution, something which may prove extremely disruptive for the likes of Deutsche Telekom and Orange.
Yet the presence of such companies at the show was not a result of them sneaking under the fence while the steely glares of the traditional operators were turned elsewhere. Many companies other than telcos have now started to use IP to deliver their content. In fact, I’ve lost count of the number of vendors who have claimed that they “have stopped calling it IPTV now”. Read more »
BT and Verizon: Worlds apart in terms of IPTV
The keynote speeches by BT and Verizon at IPTV World Forum yesterday couldn’t have been more different. Terry Denson, vice-president of programming and marketing, for Verizon’s FiOS TV service gave a slick presentation featuring slides boasting impressive subscriber numbers and aims to maximise average revenue per user (ARPU). Richard Young, director of business development for BT’s Vision choose to preface his talk with a speculative video about the future of TV, but went PowerPoint-free otherwise. Now I welcome a break from PowerPoint as much as the next person, but there was a distinct sense of style winning over content about BT’s presentation, in more ways than one. Read more »
IPTV: A gentle whiff of desperation in the air?
In 1967 Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was working on his album Smile. Paul McCartney visited him and played some tracks from Sgt Pepper, warning him “You’d better hurry up, we’re almost finished.” This was too much for Brian, who realised his project had stagnated and he’d been overtaken. Shortly after he was playing in a sandpit and having a nervous breakdown.
Walking around the IPTV World Forum today, I was struck that many of the conversations I was having were very similar to those I’d had five years ago. What is the best business model? Are open standards the way to go? Should there be greater investment in network upgrades? The success of IPTV is still very much subject to overcoming the same issues described five years earlier.
But, while many of the topics were similar, the big difference this year was the tone of the conversations. Five years ago there was a relaxed confidence surrounding IPTV. The feeling was of a technology on the cusp of something big and the world being its oyster. Today there was a slight whiff of desperation. Instead of looking forward, there was a tendency for delegates to look over their shoulder at who or what may be about to overtake them.
In his presentation at the conference, Paul Bristow of ADB summed up IPTV’s report card to date in a single word: “disappointing”. Save for a handful of positive examples, that’s a difficult summary to argue with. So does this stagnation mean IPTV is headed for a Brian Wilson style meltdown, as something ‘better’ overtakes it?
Thankfully, I think we are a long way from that, but some signs of significant progress in the near future would be very welcome. Consumers are still waiting for an ultra-compelling service that offers them easy access to the multitude of content choices available to them. It had better hurry up, but IPTV could still evolve into that service, so there’s no need to jump into the sandpit quite yet.
Could blanket licensing for ISPs be the solution to file sharing?
In most developed music markets around the world, associations representing rights holders, music companies and performers are engaged in negotiations and discussions with governments to develop guidelines, and in some cases legislation, to control the level of file sharing across P2P networks. Almost without exception, ISPs have come out against such measures. Whether ISPs have benefitted from illegal file sharing through higher subscription numbers is perhaps an argument for another day. But are ISPs missing an opportunity to cash in on file sharing and at the same time be the solution to a problem they have helped exacerbate? Read more »
Mobile Internet traffic: smartphones play only a minor role on the world stage. Much more is needed to understand global usage trends.
A major intelligence gap exists in the industry today: what mobile subscribers are really doing on their Internet-enabled handsets. While we know that global mobile Internet user numbers are increasing, (according to Informa’s latest mobile Internet research, active users of mobile Internet services are expected to grow from 666 million at end-2009 to 878 million at end-2010), analysing global mobile Internet traffic trends by specific metrics is beset by challenges. A comparative analysis of several publicly released trend reports on mobile Internet traffic during 2009 (of varying timeframes) from a variety of companies shows some clear indicators of usage trends by device, content type and geography.
Key talking points at Informa’s Mobile Financial Services Conference
Informa Telecoms & Media is holding its annual Mobile Financial Services conference on March 9-10 in London. The conference presented a good opportunity to hear views of leading industry experts on the status of the mobile banking and payments industry. It was interesting listening to the discussions and opinions of the speakers and attendees on how they feel the industry evolved in the last year, what has changed, the success stories, failures, key issues and concerns, and what’s needed to drive the growth of mobile financial services over the coming years.
The following issues were raised by many at the conference as being the key concerns and barriers to the growth of mobile banking and payments
- Ensuring security of transactions.
- Having to work with multiple partners and vendors to deploy services.
- Massive barrier to NFC at retailers’ level.
- Lack of a pan-European agreement.
- Long wait for ROI.
Also, here are some key talking points from the various presentations and panel discussions on the first day of the conference.
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