Download Weekly: Vodafone TV gets fibre-only reboot

Vodafone has rebooted its online TV service. The new version uses a puck-sized box packaged with a remote control to connect customers to the cloud. You need a fast fibre connection, but in return can get the highest quality pictures and a wealth of content.

The company describes the new version as TV-as-a-service. The cloud does all the heavy lifting. All TV shows, movies and sporting fixtures are stored on Amazon web servers and delivered on demand. The same cloud storage is also used to save a viewer's programme choices.

Vodafone TV offers Sky content along with New Zealand free to air channels. Extra channels are available as apps, there is an Netflix app, so all TV shows can be funnelled through a single access point.

There are mobile Vodafone TV clients for phones and tablets. Vodafone CEO Russell Stanners says the experience is seamless and brings all your screens together.

It also this means there are new ways of consuming television. He says you might be sitting at home watching the All Blacks test on a large screen before going on a trip.

When your taxi arrives, you can press pause on the big display. Load yourself in the car and resume watching the game from the point where you stopped en route to the airport. Pause again, dump your bags and find a seat in the lounge before getting back to watching the game on your tablet.

Using cloud services has other advantages. There's no likelihood of running out of local storage for your favourite shows. And there's a powerful reverse electronic programme guide.

This makes it easy to find the shows you want. You can even use your mobile phone to cue big screen content. It's a form of on-demand programming. Armed with the reverse programme guide, you can search back through the last week or so to find shows that you may have missed. The actual timespan wasn't discussed.

Vodafone TV uses the company's proprietary intellectual property. The company has a similar product in parts of Europe. Stanners says there has been a huge amount of local input into the service on sale here. Not least, is the work clearing the rights with content owners to build the reverse electronic programme guide.

Huawei to boost Massey wireless, prep SDN move

Huawei has win a contract to upgrade Massey University's wireless network to cope with growing student demand.

It's not just about an increase in the number of students.

Massey assistant vice-chancellor Strategy Cathy Magiannis says the existing network can cope with two devices per user. The university research future trends and found it may soon need to cope with three or four devices per user.

There's also a move from devices using high-definition video to ultra-high-definition.

Huawei will upgrade Massey’s core, distribution and access switches to increase network traffic capacity. At the same time it will prepare for a move to software-defined networking.

Magiannis says: “SDN means our IT team can be far more flexible in the provisioning of the university’s IT network. In particular, we will be able to deliver software updates, or patches, from a central remote location, rather than members of the team having to physically update hardware configurations.”

Netflix subscriptions up 50 percent year-on-year

Netflix added 5.3 million new subscribers in the third quarter of 2017. The streaming video company now has 104 million subscribers world wide. The latest additions bring the total year-on-year subscriber growth to 49 percent.

Much of the recent subscriber growth has come from outside Netflix's home based in the US.

Revenue growth has failed to keep track with subscriber numbers. The company had revenue of US$2.9 billion in the quarter, up 33 percent from a year earlier. The company expects annual revenues to hit US$11 billion.

Netflix says it plans to increase its subscription prices by between US$1 and $2 a month. The price rises will start in the US.

Chorus: Three-quarters of connections now 100Mbps plus

Chorus says 73 percent of its fibre connections are now on plans of 100Mbps or higher. Unlimited data plans make up 62 percent of the total. The average data use across fibre and copper is 162GB a month. On the fibre network the average is now 251GB. In September the company had 309,000 UFB connections. That's a 39 percent uptake.

MBIE says $320 million from augmented and virtual reality in two years

New Zealand’s augmented and virtual reality sector will have annual revenues of $320 million revenue within two years. The number comes in a report commissioned by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

The report, Virtual gets real says around 1,100 people work in the sector now. This is set to increase to over 2,200 people by 2019.

WiFi Kracked

Earlier this week researchers published information about a WPA2 weakness. WPA2 is the security standard protecting modern WiFi networks. The weakness is in the standard itself, not in individual products or implementations, which means almost everything using WPA2 is vulnerable.

The Key Reinstallation Attack, or Krack, allows criminals to steal information as it travels between a wireless device and a WiFi router. In some cases it is also possible for attackers to insert data into the traffic flow and even manipulate data.

In theory this could allow them to use ransomware or to add malware to a website.

Krack attacks cannot be made remotely. Anyone stealing your data would need to be in range of both your device and the WiFi router. And a lot of data traffic is encrypted. Windows and Apple devices are not generally vulnerable, Android devices are.