Satellite Market Perspectives

The annual NAB Show delivered a more fully digital ecosystem when it convened in Las Vegas this year. While traditional broadcast technologies are still the focus, hyperscale cloud providers, digital media platforms and no shortage of AI were all on display. Returning guests Justin Neilson and Peter Leitzinger join host Eric Hanselman to discuss what they saw at broadcasting’s big event and the impacts of various technologies on the media landscape. The digital television evolution is continuing apace. The ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV standard has been rolling out across the globe, albeit a bit more slowly in the U.S.. The higher resolution, more interactive capability is available to over three quarters of the market. Multi-screening functionality is interesting, but digital advertisers are looking to the direct access to consumers as a better path to monetizing viewers and delivering a direct path to content creators. The smart TV market is also hopeful, driving the uptake of new chipsets and televisions.   The show also revealed the greater participation of the hyperscale cloud providers in broadcast media. Greater volumes of digital content are depending on cloud scale in ever greater measure. The creeping incrementalism of AI in media production still has to overcome some fundamental objections from studios and some content creators, but it is working its way into many parts of the industry. It seems like its convenience and velocity may be too much to resist. More S&P Global Content: Radio/TV station annual outlook, 2024 MediaTalk | Season 3 | Ep. 16 - Broadcasters Band Together Over Tech Advancements, Deregulation For S&P Global subscribers: US TV set projections through 2028: Solid rebound on track to continued growth Digital multicast TV database 2024 update: NextGen TV expands reach to 75% of US Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Justin Neilson, Peter Leitzinger Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

The game of Rugby is having a moment on the global stage. It’s attracting investment and growing its fan base and audiences. The Six Nations competition has just finished, with France triumphing over Scotland and the Women’s World Cup is on the horizon. With dedicated fans and upmarket advertisers, the media rights are garnering significant interest. An old saying contrasted soccer (football to most of the world) with rugby by saying that football was a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, while rugby was a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen. And today, both the women’s and men’s games are gaining prominence. Unlike soccer (football), the world governing body for rugby spans both leagues and has strong female representation on its board. With high value advertisers driving revenue and both country competitions and national leagues creating a rich game schedule, media valuations are continuing to grow. From its origins as an amateur league, it’s become much more. There’s a nascent shift from free-to-air broadcast to paid media and streaming. It’s quite a scrum! More S&P Global Content: Authenticity, women's sports and African potential dominate SportsPro Live For S&P Global Subscribers: Sports calendar 2025 — High-profile women's events and sustainability concerns DAZN boasts its global expansion plans with acquisition of Foxtel Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Richard Berndes Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

The annual RSA Conference on information security is coming up and it arrives during a very active security market. Analysts Garrett Bekker, Dan Kennedy and research director Scott Crawford return to the podcast to discuss what they expect to see in San Franscisco with host Eric Hanselman. The largest transaction ever in the information security world, Google’s acquisition of cloud security unicorn Wiz, has been echoing across capital and technology markets. It’s reinforced the importance of cloud security and its nature as a distinct technology segment. Enterprises have become fully hybrid in their infrastructure mix and they’re struggling to mitigate cloud risks. Part of the struggle is leading to tool consolidation and platform approaches to security management. It’s a situation that’s led by the fact that the average enterprise already reports spending a third of their security budgets on a single security operations vendor. Of course, AI will be front and center and this year agentic AI is being examined as a way to scale up security capabilities. AI capabilities have been part of security tools for many years and the challenge has always been building trust in automated actions. It will be some time before autonomous actions are turned on. There’s a long history of keeping human review in place as trust is built. It’s not that different from previous technology automation transitions, but with security, there’s a greater imperative. More S&P Global Content: AI for security: Agentic AI will be a focus for security operations in 2025 The evolution of security platforms – 6 centers of gravity shaping the market Security Summer Camp 2024 and the elephant in the room Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Garrett Bekker, Scott Crawford, Daniel Kennedy Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

Cloud native patterns and open source developments were on display at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference. The biannual gathering was showing how the container ecosystem continues to mature and analysts Jean Atelsek and William Fellows join host Eric Hanselman to explore their insights. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the Linux Foundation, continues to expand the event and advance the maturity of the open source projects that are part of its purview. Day 2 operations have been gaining focus and the pre-conference FinOps X event was an indication of the emphasis on operational controls as it digs into infrastructure cost management. The opening “Day 0” events at KubeCon, which have been the forum for specialized project meetings, have become a key part of the conference, with over 6,000 attendees, almost half of the reported 13,000 total.  The Kubernetes container management project is now over ten years old and one of the other signs of technology evolution was the integration of the OpenInfra Foundation, which managed the OpenStack project and other infrastructure elements, into the Linux Foundation. Open source projects are gaining wider adoption and one of the messages from projects and vendors at KubeCon, was the hope that it could offer alternatives to enterprise infrastructure stalwart, VMware. The CNCF is expanding its investments in improving security across the projects under its umbrella. There was also continued development of platform engineering initiatives. Bounding the expanding world of open source projects to create consistent development and operational tool chains for enterprise is one more sign of maturity in the container world. More S&P Global Content: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud enter the FinOps vortex For S&P Global subscribers: Kubernetes meets the AI moment in Europe with technology, security, investment Data management, GenAI, hybrid cloud are top Kubernetes workloads – Highlights from VotE: DevOps Kubernetes ecosystem tackles new technical and market challenges Kubernetes, serverless adoption evolve with cloud-native maturity – Highlights from VotE: DevOps Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Jean Atelsek, William Fellows Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

The many impacts of AI extend across business and consumer interests and issues around privacy are some of the broadest. Analyst Paige Bartley returns to the podcast to discuss the results of two recent studies on enterprise and consumer perspectives on AI and privacy with host Eric Hanselman. Enterprise privacy concerns are shifting from regulatory to operational and reputational, as the awareness of the importance of data privacy grows. The landmark UK GDPR legislation was announced in 2016 and most early efforts focused on compliance. That’s shifted to building privacy functionality into the foundations of the way businesses operate. PrivacyOps approaches are growing rapidly as organizations come to realize that customer trust has to both be established and maintained in ways that are meaningful to customers. The opportunity for businesses is to move from treating privacy as overhead to making part of supporting business interests. It comes full circle by helping to enable better data use for AI. More S&P Global Content: The 2025 Generative AI Outlook For S&P Global Subscribers: Safeguarding privacy in the AI era – Highlights from VotE: Data & Analytics Consumers' preference for personalization still outweighs desire for data privacy – Highlights from VoCUL: Connected Customer Data Insight: Consumer data privacy in the modern world of generative AI — no going back? Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guest: Paige Bartley Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

It’s come a long way from its game developer roots and the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2025 edition was so well attended, it was straining the capacity of the San Jose Convention Center, its long-term home. John Abbott returns to discuss what debuted and the implications with host Eric Hanselman. NVIDIA has taken a starring role in AI and this year’s GTC had all of the glitz of a Hollywood production – CEO’s of major tech partners delivered a video tribute and Disney-designed robots cavorted on stage with CEO Jensen Huang. The event reinforced the extent to which NVIDIA has become a systems and software company, rather than simply a supplier of high performance silicon. The event highlighted not only new GPU’s and rack-scale compute systems, but also countered the concerns around declines in GPU demand raised by the release of the DeepSeek AI models. The shift to reasoning models for AI is expected to drive further demand. The impacts on energy consumption and associated pressure on energy transition plans weren’t mentioned, but are a large part of the larger discussion around AI. More S&P Global Content: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX commit to $100B for Stargate AI infrastructure Semiconductor Digest: A roundup of the latest developments Next in Tech | Ep. 206: NVIDIA quarterly earnings For S&P subscribers: NVIDIA pushes broader AI infrastructure story with Blackwell Ultra, full stack software NVIDIA takes commanding revenue lead in semiconductor space Tech is priced to move Generative AI Digest 25: A roundup of latest breakthroughs and developments Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guest: John Abbott Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

The M&A markets are in a tough situation. Transactions are harder to get done and exits just not happening. To sort out where this is all going, Scott Denne and Brenon Daly return to the podcast with host Eric Hanselman. Investors across technology have portfolios that are getting long in the tooth. They need exits to return value to their funds, but there are limited options. The IPO market is tentative, at best.  At the same time, strategic investors are stepping back as they spend on AI. Capital expenditures continue to grow, with hyperscalers shelling out billions to expand their own infrastructure, as well as investing in AI startups. Google’s acquisition of Wiz is a massive transaction, but it is dwarfed by the ongoing internal investments. How far does this go and what will be the return on these investments? More S&P Global Content: Tech M&A Outlook Survey: A historic bust-to-boom reversal in 2024? For S&P Global Subscribers: Shifting AI exits The public-private divide If not Wiz, who? Tech leads the way up and down on Wall Street Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Brenon Daly, Scott Denne Producer/Editor: Adam Kovalsky Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

The arrival of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite capabilities is changing broadband market dynamics as it increases capacity and improves performance. Mau Rodriguez joins host Eric Hanselman to discuss where displacement is taking place and the potential for new market entrants. The Geosynchronous satellite services that had been the backbone of remote connectivity have capacity, but come along with relatively high latency in data delivery. They’re orbiting at tens of thousands of miles, which is very long signal path, when compared to LEO satellites at around 500 miles.  The broadband market is dominated by terrestrial technologies, with cable leading the installed base and fiber growing rapidly. The subscriber cost for satellite is far higher, but the deployment cost can be much lower than that required for remote locations. While Starlink dominates this market, AWS aims to compete with its Project Kuiper plans. It just needs to get a lot of satellites launched, first. More S&P Global Content: The State of US Fiber Broadband China launches another satellite megaconstellation Survey Data Hub - VoCUL: Mobile, TV & Streaming Video Trends Q1 2025 Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guest: Mau Rodriguez Producer/Editor: Amaan Zafar, Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

The demand for power driven by datacenter expansion is a global challenge and European markets are responding with some interesting aspects. With there has been a strong renewable component to energy supply, the complexity of the energy grid has meant that unified approaches were elusive. At the same time energy markets have faced three crises – demand reduction from the COVID pandemic, strong renewable investment and market disruption from the Russian-Ukraine war. Into this congested environment, Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) offer a way to channel investment in new generation capacity. The EU has just announced guarantees for non-investment grade PPA’s, creating the possibility for expanded markets and extending the ability to treat them as an addition to commodity markets for energy.  Energy generation projects have become increasingly hybrid, bringing together multiple renewable sources with energy storage. Smoothing out renewable peaks can help it better address base load demand. Nuclear remains an expensive option, with approaches like Small Modular Reactors (SMR) still being a long ways off. There is the potential to have AI improve grid efficiency, by balancing demand and generation, an almost circular relationship, given that it is driving so much of demand. That will require more decentralization of the grid to increase flexibility and the acceptance of cryptographic protections for data sovereignty could allow workload placement near sources of power generation. There is a lot of potential for what has become an urgent issue. More S&P Global Content: What is an 'AI datacenter'? Platts London Energy Forum 2025 AI, datacenters and power: The European landscape heading into 2025 The role of nuclear in AI's future Datacenters and energy 101 — Powering through renewable intermittency 2025 US datacenters and nuclear energy report Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Ayça Taşlı, Pedro Schweizer Producer/Editor: Amaan Zafar, Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith

So much of the world around us is sensing and controlling with data, but it’s not often coordinated. Smart spaces technologies put that data to work and integrate capabilities and Zoë Roth returns to the podcast to dig into the potential of these systems with host Eric Hanselman. Smart spaces have grown out of the sensing roots in technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and shares a key element – the need to link operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT). Things like building environmental systems have historically been separated from the technology stack supporting the people that work in the building. Integration of these systems has the potential for a wide range of benefits, including improving working conditions, enhancing physical and logical security and reducing energy use. Stadiums and public venues are putting smart spaces technology to work to improve fan experience and improve safety. Extending to the macro scale, when smart spaces integrate at a city level, there’s greater efficiency and effectiveness across transportation systems, electric grids and governmental systems. Making this all work requires extending across information and functional silos. It’s a similar set of challenges that exist in digitization efforts in areas like retail, manufacturing and energy. As capabilities like digital twins and expanded support in edge computing mature, they hold promise to make smart spaces even more capable. More S&P Global Content: Smart Cities Connect 2024 Examining AI readiness and conducting a reality check What EU funding means for the next generation of European smart cities Unlocking value in smart spaces with location data Data Insight: Redefining retail — generative AI and automation Credits: Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Zoë Roth Producer/Editor: Amaan Zafar, Donovan Menard and Odesha Chan Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith