Technology giants join Net Neutrality Court Challenge

The Federal Communications Commission will be inundated with a barrage of lawsuits after its decision to approve the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. The repeal decision, which was approved December 14, 2017, allows internet service providers to restrict, bar, or charge more for particular content as they deem appropriate.

The Internet Association has announced that it will be joining legal action aimed at restoring net neutrality regulations. The association further said that it will “act as an intervener in a judicial action against this order,” meaning that while not a direct litigant, it will be given certain rights by a court to observe or act in the case. The trade group has a wide range of members including internet giants Facebook, Google, Amazon and Airbnb.

Opponents of the move including content providers, social media companies and internet retailers, claim that this will give leeway to internet service providers to start charging for faster connections on top of amount of data consumed which means startups may find it difficult to compete with established entities. However, proponents of the move say that it was long overdue as it affirms a free market economy and is likely to promote increased investment in infrastructure needed to improve connectivity.

From the time the Federal Communications Commission made the announcement in December, opponents of the action have given every indication that they will take the fight to the courts. Previously, the courts have been lenient to the FCC, giving the agency a lot of leeway in managing stakeholders in the industry but this hasn’t dampened te string of lawsuits. Etsy, for example has indicated that it will take direct legal action in the near future and New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has also announced that he will sue to block the decision, based on allegedly fake public comments submitted to the FCC prior to the vote.

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Amazon likely to bid for streaming rights to Premier League soccer

Amazon is seriously considering streaming Premier League soccer – by consulting industry experts, and will place a bid in next month’s auction.

As streaming video becomes more popular, Amazon is likely to dominate the sports segment as the battle for the rights for top leagues intensifies.

Amazon paid $50 million to stream 11 NFL games that fall in the prime Thursday night spot. Facebook on the other hand failed in its bid to clinch a deal to stream the Indian Premier League cricket matches after offering $600 million. Twitter, another contender in the streaming race, streamed 10 NFL games at a cost of $10 million.

The trend this year will be for these companies to bid for a lucrative deal like the English Premier League, and then turn focus on major U.S. leagues. These exclusive rights come at a hefty premium and Facebook is reportedly seeking to fill a new position for a senior executive who will be in charge billions of dollars for negotiating favorable rights to major sports leagues.

The use of auctions to settle on who gets the rights to broadcast games has led prices to skyrocket. The contest between big companies with heavy purses has been intense in the past and the entry of these tech giants will only up the stakes for next year. Some estimates indicate that the costs for the rights to the English Premier League may as well swell by 40 percent since it will be an auction.

Currently the rights to the EPL are shared between BT and Sky. BT paid $1.3 billion to broadcast 42 games per season for three years. On the other side of the Atlantic, NBC paid $950 million to gain rights to 19 Sunday Night Football games through the year 2022 while Fox coughed $500 million for 42 Major League Baseball games. This means that if Amazon wants exclusive rights to of major U.S. leagues it will have to up its bid in such a competitive environment.

Amazon stands to benefit more if it wins rights to any of the major leagues. Winning the Premier League rights for 2019-to-2022 would be Amazon’s biggest prize yet that would result in a boost to its Prime program. The Prime membership program has grown to become a goldmine for the company. Prime members have been known to spend more on Amazon compared to non members. Live streaming of popular sports will therefore be an inducement to bring on board new members who in turn would ramp up revenues from subscriptions and also from retail sales.

The hefty price Amazon would pay in an auction would be easily be recouped in the double of new subscriptions and added retail sales.

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Amazon releases new development kits that will propel Alexa to more devices

Third party device makers are always getting access to new developer tools from Amazon that enable them easily integrate Alexa into their products and 2018 will be no different. Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant is the leader in its class and the company seems focused on making it easier for any device manufacturer to integrate it into their products.

The digital assistant marketplace has become competitive with giants like Apple and Google angling for a piece of the pie. Other entrants like Samsung and Alibaba bring on board formidable arsenals of technology to reckon with. However, Amazon has a competitive advantage in this space with Alexa boasting over 25,000 skills accumulated so far.

In an announcement, the company will be releasing two new development kits – Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit and Alexa Premium Far-Field Voice Development Kit. The former will focus on smartwatches, fitness trackers, headphones and other mobile devices by enebling them to hook up to Alexa Voice Service, Amazon’s core that uses bluetooth technology to add Alexa to connected devices. The latter will be a single chip with the audio algorithms and wake word engine used by Alexa with the same microphone array configurations found in the Amazon Echo and Echo Show.

Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service has the flexibility of letting manufacturers integrate it into their devices and has been open to developers since 2015 giving Alexa greater penetration and enticing third-party developers to use the Alexa Skills Kit  in building skills relevant to the service. Use of cloud services has also made it easier for developers to write code that can integrate into Alexa’s abilities so that spoken commands are understood more seamlessly.

In order to solidify its market share, Amazon provided to developers the artificial intelligence technology Amazon Lex, which is the engine that powers Alexa. To achieve more in the devices domain, the 7-Mic Voice Processing Technology was also made available to third party hardware manufacturers for integration.

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Amazon ramps up presence at CES 2018

Amazon and other tech giants take action to stem Intel chip vulnerability

Several companies have moved quickly to release updates to their products and services in a bid to forestall any exploitation of vulnerabilities in Intel chips.

The vulnerabilities affect a wide range of products and services that not only use Intel chips, but chips from other vendors too. These include servers that are used for cloud computing, computers and other personal devices. This could allow hackers to gain access to information on the chip’s memory such as passwords.

The vulnerability that affects Intel chips is known as Meltdown, while the one affecting other manufacturers is called Spectre.

Microsoft announced that it is working with chip manufacturers to protect its customers by providing updates to its cloud services. The company also said that it has released security updates for Windows used on personal computers and servers that run on chips from different vendors including AMD Intel and Arm. Other updates released were for the company’s Edge and Internet Explorer.

Google has also updated its cloud services to mitigate any possible attacks. The search giant said that updates were performed using the VM Live Migration technology without impacting customer experience. Google customers were however advised to update operating systems they use on the Google cloud. The company added that it has updated its Chrome operating system and has not identified any vulnerability in Android devices.

Amazon on the other hand said that the vulnerability has been present for more than 20 years in processors from Intel, AMD, and ARM across mobile devices, servers and desktops. The company assured its customers that its AWS cloud services were already protected but advised customers to update their operating systems.

Intel, which manufactures chips that are affected by the vulnerability, said that patches to operating systems will not cause performance slowdowns as has been reported elsewhere but in cases where such slowdowns are experienced they are workload-dependent.

Another tech company Red Hat, said that it is working on updates to  its products which will be made available on an ongoing basis. The company, which distributes Linux said that some of their patches are already live and more will be released soon.

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Live sports streaming the next frontier in battle of the titans between Facebook and Amazon

Fire TV and Echo Show lose YouTube as Google fires first salvo in rekindled war with Amazon