Intel’s all-cash $15.3 billion deal to buy Mobileye last year (see 1703130015) was "one of our most strategic acquisitions we've made in quite a while now," CEO Brian Krzanich told Intel’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday. The purchase “is really focused on autonomous driving and really driving a scalable platform that is cost effective and includes a very different approach for how you take a safety-first, safety-centered approach to autonomous driving,” said Krzanich. “We now have these cars driving on the streets and you'll continue to see more and more of the cars driving and partners signing up for Mobileye technology to carry us forward in the autonomous driving marketplace.”
One week into SiriusXM’s launch of its new iOS and Android streaming apps and web player, including the debut of a Howard Stern video offering (see 1804250075 or 1804250005), the company is getting a “good initial response from customers” to the new services, Chief Financial Officer David Frear told a JPMorgan investment conference. The offering has “a limited amount of video,” said Frear. “It's a sort of way of walking into that new product feature, walk before you run,” he said Wednesday. “We would expect to enrich” the video content as “the summer goes on, as we come into the fall,” he said. On SiriusXM’s ambitions in streaming content, “we've done OK with it, but we could do much better,” said Frear. “We never had a product manager who is focused just on streaming” but do now, he said. “Broadening subscriber engagement” would be a good measure of the company’s success in streaming, he said.
Ford autonomous commercial vehicle efforts will start “city by city,” Chris Brewer, chief engineer of its autonomous-driving program, told an Evercore ISI investment conference Tuesday, standing by the company's forecasts to begin commercial deployments in 2021. In each city, “we’ll have a geo-fenced area that we feel comfortable we can operate in safely,” said Brewer. Ford on day one won’t “pop a hundred thousand vehicles” on the road. Once demonstrated the technology works, “you have to feel comfortable that you can safely deploy,” he said. “You need to have a regulatory environment that’s ready to accept it, and you have to have customers who believe it’s going to work.” The plan is to run an autonomous-driving “pilot” next year in Miami, where the automaker is “mapping the geo-fenced area" and working with partners like Domino’s and food-delivery service Postmates, the engineer said.
CTA "remains opposed" to the use of tariffs to address the "imbalance" in the U.S.-China trade "because of the high likelihood of short- and long-term negative consequences," said Sage Chandler, vice president-international trade, in written testimony sent to us Wednesday on the second day of hearings (see 1805150074) before the U.S. Trade Representative’s office on proposed 25 percent tariffs. Some members, "including innovative startups," fear this would "put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors in other nations," she said. Prices will rise an average of 23 percent on TVs and other consumer products if the proposed tariffs for Chinese intellectual property issues are imposed, said David French, National Retail Federation senior vice president-government affairs, in written testimony Wednesday. The Internet Association appreciates the administration “is trying to address” the “trade barriers” that block U.S. internet services from penetrating China, depriving them of “billions of dollars in potential business,” testified Jordan Haas, director-trade and international policy, Wednesday. “Tariffs, however, are the wrong solution.” Internet companies “understand that tariffs are hidden, regressive taxes that will be paid by the U.S. consumer in the form of higher product prices and by hurting companies’ ability to invest in future technology,” he said. Many of the products on the proposed tariff list are consumer goods, including TVs, and tariffs on them would be “problematic for internet companies,” so they should be removed, said Haas. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association agrees the levies "will not help support and could materially injure the global competitiveness of our industries," said Kyle Pitsor, vice president-government relations, in written testimony Wednesday.
The U.S. Trade Representative’s proposed 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods over intellectual property issues and the Trump administration’s “escalating” threats to raise tariffs higher “will not effectively advance our shared goal” of changing China’s “harmful” trade practices “in a durable, verifiable, and enforceable manner,” commented CTA, the Information Technology Industry Council, Telecommunications Industry Association and many others. “The proposed tariffs will be counterproductive and undermine” the administration’s efforts “to change China’s policies and practices” through face-to-face negotiations, the groups filed Friday in docket USTR-2018-0005. “Tariffs are taxes.” CTA said it “categorically opposes the imposition of tariffs on the products identified in USTR’s proposed list.”
Nvidia sees autonomous driving as a $60 billion “addressable market opportunity” by 2035, said Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress on a Thursday earnings call. “We believe that every vehicle will be autonomous one day. By 2035, this will encompass 100 million autonomous passenger vehicles and 10 million robo taxis.” Nvidia’s Drive Constellation virtual reality platform will help autonomous-driving developers “test and validate their systems in a virtual world across a wide range of scenarios before deploying on the road,” she said. “Each year, 10 trillion miles are driven around the world. Even if test cars can eventually cover millions of miles, that's an insignificant fraction of all the scenarios that require testing to create a safe and reliable autonomous vehicle.” More than 370 companies and research institutions are using the platform, she said. CEO Jensen Huang sees driver-less taxis going to market starting next year and self-driving cars “probably somewhere between 2020 and 2021,” he said in Q&A. The size of the market opportunity “is fairly well-modeled,” he said. “I believe that every single everything that moves someday will be autonomous or have autonomous capabilities.” The estimate of 100 million autonomous vehicles on the road by 2035 includes passenger cars and “the countless taxis, all the trucks, all the agriculture equipment, all the pizza delivery vehicles, you name it,” he said. ”Everything is going to be autonomous, and the market opportunity is going to be quite large, and that's the reason why we're so determined to go create that market.”
NextRadio developer Emmis Communications feels “very strongly about the future" for the FM-reception smartphone app, said CEO Jeff Smulyan on a Thursday earnings call. “We’ve had some terrific discussions with other broadcasters about that future, and we’re working on that.” Emmis also is “excited about the future for NextRadio outside the United States, not only in Latin America and Canada, but also now in Asia,” he said. Q4 ended Feb. 28 was “another good quarter” for NextRadio, said Smulyan. The quarter included Samsung’s agreement to unlock FM chips in its Galaxy phones and JVCKenwood’s CES announcement adopting NextRadio for the connected car (see 1801120025). “I think we are seeing the realization among our industry and among advertisers of the value of the data attribution to advertisers that we provide” through NextRadio, he said. “Stay tuned for more interesting announcements from NextRadio and our involvement with other broadcasters, who see the value of the work that we’re doing, that we need to do as an industry.”
Pearl TV and its partners in the Phoenix ATSC 3.0 model-market project are “collaborating” with the Spectrum Co. consortium that Sinclair shares with American Tower, Cunningham Broadcasting, Nexstar and Univision to fashion a “transition model that we could offer to the industry as a way to move multiple markets, so that we’re all operating on the same sheet of paper,” Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle told us Wednesday. The ultimate goal is to blanket the U.S. with coverage in a "rapid build" over three years, said Schelle.
Disney is “still deep in the regulatory process” of acquiring much of 21st Century Fox (see 1712140038), said CEO Bob Iger on a Tuesday earnings call. “I can't share any more information or engage in further speculation about the deal, except to say that we strongly believe in the value” of the Fox “assets as part of our ongoing strategy to create growth in a very dynamic global marketplace,” said Iger. There was no mention on the call of Comcast’s reported all-cash offer for Fox (see 1805080004). Disney soft-launched the ESPN+ over-the-top service about a month ago with a marketing strategy that’s “relatively modest in nature,” said Iger. He wouldn't disclose statistics on the ESPN+ launch, “except to say that so far, so good,” he said. “A number of people have signed up, obviously, for the trial and our conversion rates have been good so far. Most importantly, the technology is working, the user interface is considered good, the fan reaction has been quite strong.” Disney is pricing the service at $4.99 monthly, starting with a seven-day free trial.
Though the Consumer Product Safety Commission inquiry into the “potential safety issues” of IoT devices ruled out plans to address “personal data security and privacy issues” as part of its review (see 1803290032), the Cybersecurity Coalition believes “safety and security standards for IoT devices are inextricably linked and should be addressed in tandem,” said May 2 comments (document ID CPSC-2018-0007-0031) posted Monday in docket CPSC-2018-0007 and "withdrawn" on Wednesday because it was deemed a "duplicate of material" previously submitted. “A common feature across all IoT devices is their ability to communicate across information networks and to act on the physical world, which makes securing these communications and controlling access to device functionality central to maintaining both the safety and security of the device, said the coalition, whose members include AT&T, Cisco, Intel, McAfee, Microsoft, Mozilla and Symantec. For example, shipping an IoT device to consumers with a factory-default password or other “known vulnerabilities” is both a security risk, “as this could give attackers access to consumers’ information,” and a safety risk “if attackers are able to gain control of device functionality,” it said. The coalition has a long history of “using a voluntary, consensus-based, industry-led approach to setting security standards,” and encourages CPSC to “use this approach to set safety standards for IoT devices,” it said. Comments in CPSC's review are due June 15, and a hearing is planned for Wednesday. The agency said it will use the feedback to better “inform future Commission risk management work.”