Dish Network views ATSC 3.0 as “a pretty intriguing technology, and so therefore we were willing to co-invest with some of the broadcasters in testing” through the single-frequency-network (SFN) 3.0 trials Sinclair spearheaded in Dallas (see 1804080002), said Tom Cullen, Dish executive vice president-corporate development, on a Tuesday earnings call. On Sinclair’s description of Dish at the NAB Show as a surprising 3.0 partner, Cullen agreed Dish and broadcasters “wear different hats when it comes to these relationships.”
Many IoT players are interested in an alliance on device security, Russ Gyurek, Cisco director-Innovation Labs, told a CTA event in Santa Clara, California, last week. “I’ve talked to dozens of companies. Nobody has said this is a bad idea. So I’ve got right now about 30 companies that are willing to be founders or start this. I don’t want it to be just another alliance. It needs to be very little cost and have a mission of driving this.” The proposal, which doesn’t yet have a name, is based heavily on manufacturer usage description specifications and bootstrapping remote secure key infrastructures protocol that is in the final stages of standards-setting at the Internet Engineering Task Force, said Gyurek. The alliance would promote self-certification. Cisco plans demonstrations at next month’s Cisco Live conference in Orlando, he said. “We’ve had a couple of discussions with service providers in that respect. They’re very interested in this, especially as 5G starts to become more online, because 5G promises massive IoT.”
Tesla is “making really good progress” toward achieving full autonomy in self-driving vehicles that would become part of a ride-sharing network, said CEO Elon Musk on a Wednesday earnings call. “We'll probably be ready by the end of next year.” Regulatory oversight is the big unknown in light of recent fatalities, said Musk, including the death of a Tesla Model X driver in a March 23 accident in Mountain View, California. Musk ripped into the news media for what he called “inflammatory” stories falsely depicting autonomous-driving as unsafe. “Autonomy doesn't reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero,” he said. "It improves it substantially.” If the media are “hounding the regulators, and the public is laboring on misapprehension that autonomy is less safe because of misleading press, then this is where I find the challenge of predicting it to be very difficult,” said Musk of timelines for regulatory OK. The company is seeing a “steady increase” in the “percentage of miles driven using Autopilot,” except for temporary “dips” that occurred after accidents like the one in Mountain View, said Musk.
Day Two of ATSC’s Next-Gen TV Conference will mark 25 years to the day of the formation of HDTV’s Grand Alliance that became the basis of the current A/53 ATSC 1.0 DTV broadcast system, said an ATSC agenda item. Details of the commemoration weren’t disclosed. The alliance, formed officially on May 24, 1993, settled on an approach that allowed both progressive and interlaced scanning, but encouraged a rapid transition to all-progressive, according to coverage by our predecessor newsletter Television Digest With Consumer Electronics and by Communications Daily. According to the Digest, the alliance included the partnership of General Instrument and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which advocated both progressive and interlaced systems; the Advanced TV Research Consortium of NBC, Philips, Sarnoff Labs, Thomson and Compression Labs (interlaced only); and the team of Zenith and AT&T (progressive only). The alliance had its critics, said the Digest. Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, blasted the alliance as a “terrible mistake” because it would isolate the U.S. from global standards-setting on DTV. Attempts to reach Negroponte for comment on whether he stands by his criticisms 25 years later were unsuccessful.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Jobs are “an issue that is at the forefront of every single discussion that we have” on the subject of artificial intelligence, Michael Hayes, CTA senior manager-government affairs, told a workshop Tuesday at the CTA Technology and Standards Forum on the legislative implications of AI. CTA recently hired a vice president-U.S. jobs (see 1710110002) “to tackle this issue specifically,” said Hayes.
China, from which Intel drew more than 20 percent of its 2017 revenue, is “one of our fastest-growing segments,” and so “we're counting on our leaders and the leaders of the world to go resolve these issues,” said CEO Brian Krzanich on a Thursday earnings call of the looming threat of U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports and the retaliatory Chinese actions that might follow (see 1803220043). “We believe in fair trade,” said Krzanich. “We believe that countries and companies need to be able to play in markets fairly and compete, and we're counting on this getting worked out. That's very important to us.” Intel’s Mobileye autonomous-vehicle “test fleet” has begun operating in Israel and “will expand to other geographies in the coming months,” said Krzanich. The fleet “fully implements” the “responsible-sensitive safety” system that Intel introduced last year, he said. “This unique system applies a formal common-sense safety seal to the vehicle's decision-making, resulting in the optimal combination of provable safety and human-like driving style.” Intel views the “winning path” to autonomous driving as a “progression” from current advanced driver-assistance systems to full autonomy, he said. “We're seeing significant momentum in the marketplace, including a recent high-volume design win for EyeQ5,” Mobileye’s fifth-generation vision-processing SoCs, with “a European premium vehicle manufacturer,” he said.
Sony’s introduction and subsequent termination of the Dash personal internet viewer provoked a federal complaint Friday alleging the company is guilty of fraud and concealment for not telling consumers it wouldn’t go on supporting the product. The claims arise from the company's decision in July “to unilaterally and without recourse cut off its support” of the Dash, said the complaint (in Pacer), filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, and seeking class-action status. Sony terminated all functionality on the Dash through a “forced firmware update,” said the complaint. “As many disgruntled purchasers have posted on the internet, they are left with a paperweight, which cost between $100 and $200.” Consumers wouldn't have bought the Dash “if they knew that just within a few years,” Sony would “choose to stop supporting the product,” which was “only functional for a commercially unreasonable time,” it said. Introduced at January 2010 CES, the Dash tapped into cloud-based content, with no onboard storage (see 1103110137). Sony representatives didn’t comment Friday.
As the market transitions to 5G, “the engineering challenges embedded in the 5G opportunity play directly to Qualcomm's strengths and the focused investment we have made over the last several years,” said CEO Steve Mollenkopf on a Wednesday earnings call. “We are leading the industry to 5G and we are pleased to see the strength of our roadmap helping to enable the upcoming commercial launches of 5G networks and devices, including the 18 network operators and 20 manufacturers that have selected our X50 5G modem for trials and 5G devices.” Qualcomm will go to market on 5G with a standards-essential-patents-only licensing offering at an “effective” royalty rate of 3.25 percent for “multimode” devices compliant with the Release-15 suite of 5G specifications that 3GPP finalized in December, said Mollenkopf. Modeled after the SEP-only licensing program Qualcomm “successfully” launched in China three years ago, using the same approach for licensing 5G “facilitates the effort to conclude agreements and extensions in 2018 and early 2019, providing for a seamless transition for the launch of 5G devices in 2019,” he said. The company will continue offering its “portfolio-wide” licensing package at the higher 5 percent royalty rate, said Qualcomm Technology Licensing President Alex Rogers in Q&A. “We expect on a go-forward basis that there will be a number of licensees who are interested in extensions and renewals who may want to have SEP-only license agreements,” said Rogers. “We expect there will be a number of licensees who want to maintain portfolio-wide agreements worldwide, but there will also be licensees who want to have SEP-only agreements on a worldwide basis. And that is, of course, something that we can accommodate on a case-by-case basis.”
With new apps and web player giving SiriusXM subscribers access through smartphones, smart TVs and smart speakers, “it’s never been easier to enjoy SiriusXM outside the car,” said CEO Jim Meyer on a Wednesday earnings call. The company is “building the resources to focus on acquiring streaming-only subscribers,” he said. Such additions “will invariably be small compared to subs generated from our 20-million-plus annual vehicle trial funnel,” he said. “If we are successful, they still could meaningfully bend our long-term subscriber-growth arc.” Though competitors were successful in expanding subscriptions through a “streaming-only offering,” SiriusXM hasn’t “really been able to do what I wanted to do, technically, until recently,” in the streaming space, said Meyer. President-Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein sees “lots of opportunities” for video. He said it's "complementary to our audio, and it will stay that way, but there are obviously assets that come to mind that would be valuable in video, in short-form video, with very little expense to put them out" a la what's coming from Sirius host Howard Stern.
Streamed, live news is popular, Roku found by surveying its customers, Shubhada Hebbar, Roku TV director-product development, told us Tuesday, demonstrating added content discovery features. "We’ve worked with a few networks” to bring live news and video feeds to the service, she said. The company is adding “live and linear” news content to the free, ad-supported Roku Channel, including the 24-hour ABC News Live stream, as well as “news feeds” from partners Cheddar, PeopleTV and Newsy.