The FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee meets virtually Dec. 17 at 11 a.m. EST, the FCC said Thursday. The BDAC “will consider and vote on a report and recommendation from the Increasing Broadband Investment in Low-Income Communities working group,” it said. It last month couldn't finalize a report from that WG (see 2010290057).
Cloud service providers need to better coax creators to move their content production to the cloud, Microsoft Azure Media and Entertainment Chief Technology Officer Hanno Basse told a SMPTE 2020 virtual conference keynote Tuesday. Azure embarked on a “customer listening tour” with “well-prepared survey questions,” canvassing nearly four dozen “top creators” in the film and TV industry, said Basse, CTO at 20th Century Fox Film before its sale to Disney and ex-founding president of the UHD Alliance. He joined Microsoft in April. The survey's goal was to give Azure a “good, wholesome picture” about the creative industry’s cloud “expectations,” using that feedback to better “inform” its product development process, he said. Azure heard from creators that cloud vendors “need to do a better job of actually raising awareness as to what cloud production actually means and the benefits that it brings,” said Basse. An important part of that is “total cost of ownership,” he said. Creators told Azure “security and access control” are fundamentally important cloud requirements, he said. It heard from “people in the trenches” that there’s a constant “tug of war” between personnel on the set and studio heads about “what they want to make available to the studio executives,” he said. “Not every day is perfect on set, so there needs to be a way of not exposing everything that goes on there.”
The transformational smart home will “reshape" both "consumer services and citizen interactions,” ABI Research reported Thursday. The “sentient home” will automatically adjust in real time to changes in weather, in individuals’ presence and preferences, said Jonathan Collins. The “cooperative home” will be part of a network of homes integrated within an area, while the “new lifestyle home” will support more activities within a smaller footprint. “Home as a business” will support revenue-generating services; the “low-impact” home will automate control “in a push toward zero environmental impact"; and the “marketplace home” will define how smart home management providers control access to consumers, said the analyst. ABI predicts global smart home spending will grow an average of about 24% annually to $317.6 billion by 2026.
Lenovo plans to introduce its first 5G Chromebook in the second half next year at the premium tier of the laptop space, said Chief Operating Officer Gianfranco Lanci on a fiscal Q2 call Tuesday. “I'm not afraid of any deterioration of the average selling price of Chromebook.” Competition in the Chromebook segment is limited to “four to five players,” he said. “I don't see additional players coming.” Lenovo had $10 to $20 "improvement" in Chromebook ASPs the past three quarters, he said. Chromebook demand for remote work and learning soared during the pandemic (see 2009110020). PCs and tablets “are now one device per person” in the “new normal” of COVID-19, said CEO Yuanqing Yang. Lenovo projects total PC market will grow by about 25 million units globally this year from 2019 and will “reach very close to 300 million units” in 2020, he said. The forecast is for 7% growth in 2021 PC demand, said Lanci. There’s a “dynamic shift” in PC demand that will “continue to create tailwinds for e-learning, work from home, play from home, cloud infrastructure and 5G,” said Chief Financial Officer Wai Ming: “We are optimistic that these long-term structural trends could enlarge the addressable market” for PCs and cloud infrastructure products, plus speed deployment of 5G services.
Comcast and Walmart didn’t comment Tuesday on reports they’re in talks to develop and sell smart TVs. A Tuesday Wall Street Journalarticle said the companies are discussing possible Walmart-branded TVs that would run Comcast software with streaming apps on a platform similar to those offered by Amazon, Roku, Google and Apple. Walmart would get a cut of the streaming revenue. Walmart sells Roku TVs under its Onn private-label brand and from Hisense, JVC, RCA and TCL.
Q3 revenue in the communications “end market” at On Semiconductor declined 7% from the 2019 quarter, said CEO Keith Jackson on a Monday investor call (also see Q3 here.) The chipmaker experienced strong growth in its 5G infrastructure sector, but “our smartphone business declined year over year, in part due to geopolitical factors related to a customer,” said Jackson, obviously referencing Huawei. Communications revenue growth in Q4 likely will be flat or down quarter over quarter, “due to an expected revenue decline from customer-specific geopolitical factors,” he said. “In Q3, there certainly was an impact” from the mid-September halt of shipments to Huawei due to the Commerce Department’s tightened export restrictions on the Chinese smartphone OEM, said Jackson. In Q4, until Commerce grants export licenses authorizing the resumption of shipments, “there is no business at all” with Huawei, he said. “They were one of the top customers.” Jackson thinks “there will be more reluctance” next year among Chinese smartphone OEM customers “to accept sole-source positions from U.S.-based companies as a result of the trade tensions” between the U.S. and China: “They’re very wise economic buyers, and they’re going to do the best thing for their company, but they certainly don’t want to be completely reliant on a U.S. supplier.” The Huawei business that On lost shifted quickly to European competitors, he said.
NTT Global Data Centers Americas is prohibited from misrepresenting privacy program compliance, the FTC announced with a 3-1-1 vote Wednesday in a settlement with the company over Privacy Shield allegations. Commissioner Rohit Chopra dissented. NTT, formerly known as RagingWire Data Centers, misrepresented its participation in the PS after certification lapsed in 2018, the FTC alleged. The settlement “does nothing to help these businesses or to meaningfully hold NTT accountable,” Chopra said, noting lack of monetary penalty, liability or relief for victims. Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who has been on intermittent maternity leave, didn’t participate. The company didn’t comment.
IoT has a “long path,” Silicon Labs CEO Tyson Tuttle told investors Wednesday, and momentum is “starting to build” in the consumer market. “You are going to continue to see new technologies and new capabilities added,” he said. “Ease of use is also something that must get addressed for it to scale.” Wireless was over two-thirds of Silicon Labs’ IoT business in Q3, helping to drive overall revenue to the high end of guidance at $221.3 million, down from $223 million in the year-ago quarter but up from $207.5 million in Q2. Revenue from IoT products set a record at $133 million, up 16% from Q2, said Chief Financial Officer John Hollister. Customers are moving from separate microcontrollers to connected devices that add wireless or that integrate the two, said Tuttle. The company expects to gain traction in smart home, industrial and proprietary and consumer segments via its Zigbee, Thread and Bluetooth business.
Give consumers what they want and let them shop accordingly, said Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner on a National Retail Federation webinar Tuesday, noting retailers must adapt to how people expect to shop in uncertain times. COVID-19 accelerated initiatives the retailer had in its sights, he said. On holding three November deal events (see 2010140038) versus Black Friday week, Furner said it was a Texas store team’s email suggesting giving employees Thanksgiving off, “with all that’s going on,” that put in motion the decision. Three events give customers time to think through shopping options and whether to buy in store or online, or buy online, pick up in store. “Our events will be much more digital this year than they’ve ever been before,” the executive said. Furner compared changes in retailing to time he spent with Walmart in China in 2013-15, when he saw a rate of consumer change “enabled by technology that I probably would not have dreamed possible at such a large scale had I not been there.” A country with 1 billion consumers went from “analog and physical to digital in just a couple years.” Built on mobile technology, it showed “how fast things can happen without the constraint of legacy infrastructure. You’re trying to adapt as you move.” Since the pandemic, “we think we probably skipped a couple of years, if not three or four years, of adopting one channel and using the other channel to help enable it,” said Furner.
Verance can address risks of fingerprint-based dynamic advertising insertion (DAI) technologies marring subscription VOD viewing, said the company. With DAI technologies “baked” into smart TVs, SVOD services and TV makers worry about the risk of “ads or measurement functions meant for broadcast being mistakenly placed into the streams” of over-the-top video services, it said. “We believe this will create a path forward for the subscription VOD and ad-supported broadcast worlds to co-exist,” said CEO Nil Shah Thursday.