Doreen Bogdan-Martin remains the front-runner to be elected ITU secretary-general at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, which starts Sept. 26, but industry officials who have been trying to count votes say nothing is guaranteed. Some warned of "ripple effects" if Russian nominee Rashid Ismailov is elected, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The vote comes a year ahead of the next World Radiocommunications Conference.

Disney’s linear networks are “huge cash generators for us,” said CEO Bob Chapek, responding to a question on a fiscal Q2 earnings call Wednesday about what’s holding him back from converting ESPN to a streaming-only service. The U.S. launch of the Disney+ ad-supported subscription tier (see 2203040042) is on track for later in calendar 2022, he said.

Product backlogs persist at Sonos “and will cost us a little more than we had previously expected,” said CEO Patrick Spence on the company’s Wednesday Q2 FY 2022 earnings call, citing increased component and logistics costs.

Moving to open radio access networks is critical to smaller players like XCOM-Labs, as well as for innovation, said its founder Paul Jacobs, the former Qualcomm CEO, during an Open RAN Policy Coalition webinar Wednesday. Other speakers said the move to the cloud will spur ORAN, but developing standards and better interoperability remain challenges.

Supply chain disruption slammed Q1 revenue at WiSA Technologies, but the company held to full-year revenue guidance of 30%-50% growth to $8.5 million-$10 million on a Wednesday earnings call. WiSA expects sequential growth in Q2 but not year-on-year growth, said Chief Financial Officer George Oliva.

GlobalFoundries thinks some segments of the consumer tech market are “normalizing” after historically high spikes in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially low-end smartphones and PCs, said CEO Tom Caulfield on a Q1 earnings call Tuesday. “Neither of these markets are areas of strategic focus for GF, with the exception of a few applications in these end markets that require unique and differentiated technology,” he said.

Sony shipped 1.6 million TVs in its fiscal Q4 ended March 31, finishing the year with 8.5 million sets sold, reported the company Tuesday. Year-over-year unit shipments were down 20% for the quarter and 9% for the year, yet revenue for the year in the core consumer tech segment, Electronics Products and Services, increased 13% to 271.1 billion yen ($2.08 billion), “due to an improvement in the product mix,” said Sony.

As it moves toward a fall separation of its intellectual property licensing and product businesses, Xperi’s focus on the product side is on driving adoption of higher value IPTV solutions to offset subscriber declines in its traditional electronic programming guide business, said CEO Jon Kirchner on a Q1 earnings call Monday.

A 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel debated whether social media platforms more closely align with common carriers or with newspapers and broadcasters in a case that could have major implications for internet speech (see 2204040039). Judges were skeptical of arguments from both the tech industry and Texas during oral argument Monday in New Orleans.

Development of open radio access networks, and the security and reliance of 5G, require cooperation between government and industry, said Brendan Dowling, an Australian communications official, during an Open RAN Policy Coalition virtual conference Monday. The session is part of the ongoing Quadrilateral Security Dialogue among the governments of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. Leaders of the quad countries will meet May 24 in Tokyo for a summit, where infrastructure is expected to be a main topic, speakers said.