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Taking Care with Mobile Device Management
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Mobile Device Management is going through a transition, from its roots in Firmware-over-the-Air (FOTA) for CDMA operators and GSM device configuration, to a foundation for a rich set of over-the-air customer care capabilities. The ROI for this new home of MDM in customer care, addressing a $25 billion annual problem, is proven, with the net result being lower operational expenses for the operator and increased customer satisfaction. Mobile Network Operators are facing challenges in delivering quality customer care, especially in the light of the explosive growth of smartphones.
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Exclusive Home Theater Experiences Drive Customer Loyalty, Transcend Economy
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For the first time ever, we saw HDTV shipments surpass standard TV shipments in 2008. Not only was this driven by price reduction for the hardware itself, but also by the increased availability of HD content, in part spurred by the efficient MPEG-4 standard that allows programmers and cable companies to deliver HD content in half the bandwidth of MPEG-2. How will these trends play out in the current economic climate?
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Maximizing Bandwidth, Minimizing Capex with DOCSIS 3.0 and an Integrated CMTS
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The cable industry has talked about DOCSIS 3.0 for years, but the speed at which it's suddenly becoming a necessity is nothing short of breathtaking. While subscribers will soon look for increased upstream bandwidth, cable operators have a window of time where they can focus primarily on downstream throughput and take advantage of DOCSIS 3.0 technology that has now been commercially deployed.
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Optical Burst Switching Scales Metro Networks for IPTV
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With Ethernet over DWDM, optical circuits must be pre-provisioned for peak traffic, which means unused bandwidth is idle and unusable by other network elements. A new technology, Optical burst switching (OBS), promises to leverage rapidly tunable lasers to deliver the any-to-any flexibility of Ethernet switching, the resiliency of SONET dual ring topologies and the enormous bandwidth of DWDM. Here's a look.
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Push VOD Architecture Scales Deployments while Controlling Costs
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As IPTV deployments expand and evolve, carriers must find cost-effective ways to intelligently distribute content while maintaining a high-quality viewer experience. Push VOD is an emerging technology that pre-positions popular content directly on subscriber set-top boxes (STBs) during non-peak hours for immediate viewing on request. Push VOD leverages the growing footprint of hard disk-based STBs to pre-populate viewer devices with popular new movies and programs during off hours, thereby reducing network bandwidth requirements and providing immediate access for viewers. Push VOD also allows service providers to deliver special-interest content to premium subscribers, to enable HD content on networks only capable of SD transmission, and to perform software and feature upgrades to the STB itself.
This article discusses the requirements for successful Push VOD services, and shows how properly-implemented IP multicast technology meets or exceeds those requirements.
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Service Creation Environments: An OSS Revolution
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A new wave of Service Creation Environments are giving service providers the tools to assemble broadband bundles combining access and content services within hours instead of months. These Service Creation Environment let marketers take base-level network elements such as DSL, chop them up and present them back in more exciting ways than competitors using the same underlying infrastructure..
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TV as the Ultimate IMS Endpoint
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The lifetime value of a triple- or quad-play subscriber is worth exponentially more than a single-service subscriber. The biggest factor in this calculation is not ARPU, but rather"stickiness" that results in reduction in churn and also reduction in the retention spending required to minimize churn. IMS could tie all services together. Service providers do not need to wait for their complete IMS build-out and/or advanced digital boxes capable of SIP communications, as this could take years -- even decades -- to happen across an entire operating region. A hybrid approach is an option.
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How Addressable Advertising Creates IPTV Revenue
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Unlike current terrestrial, cable and satellite television, IPTV enables ‘addressable advertising' that can be closely tailored to the viewer: not just according to geography, but by a wide range of other factors.
IPTV advertising promises additional income for service providers and may help abate the trend of ad-skipping through PVRs.
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Enabling Innovation in IPTV through the Multi-vendor Approach
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There are many arguments in favor of multi-vendor over single-vendor, including those for flexibility and increased price competition. However, perhaps the single most important reason for choosing the multi-vendor approach is that this is the only route that enables the operator to ensure that it can choose innovative solutions that fit its requirements, both now and in the future.
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Billing and Provisioning for Long-Term IPTV Success
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Provisioning will be particularly challenging for IPTV services, especially when the greatest value proposition of IPTV is consumer choice -- putting an end to one-size-fits-all entertainment packages of the past. This will put tremendous emphasis on support applications. While entertainment and communication choices grow, home users will continue to want simple provisioning procedures and easy-to-follow billing rules. Along with more choices, they will expect to be able to activate and deactivate new services – perhaps even on a daily basis.
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The Value-Added IPTV Services Bundle
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While excitement continues to grow around telco IPTV deployments, some in the industry have expressed concerns over the ability to recoup these huge IPTV deployment costs through new service revenues. These concerns are generally founded on the belief that IPTV is only about telcos delivering a video offering to the home. However, basic video services are just the tip of the iceberg.
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Don’t Trip up Triple Play: Deploy Voice over IP
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Triple Play is clealy the direction of many wirelline carriers today. Given that the future platform for voice delivery is IP, the sooner carriers realize the benefits of integrating the services and optimizing the infrastructure as part of their Triple Play strategy, the better it will be for them and the consumer.
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IPTV Meets IMS
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IMS enables the separation of applications from the underlying network. While originally defined for for 3G mobile phone systems, the IMS model has now been adopted as a baseline technology for network and service convergence by wireless, wireline and cable providers. Here is how it could be integrated with IPTV to enable personalized services across any broadband connection, wireless or wireline.
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Future Proof for On-Demand
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Content is at the core of every VOD offering – the depth and breadth of your content offering will make or break your VOD deployment. The good news for telcos is that it's estimated that 60% of all titles ordered in a VOD deployment are the same top 10-40 titles. However, a key question for telcos is whether to deploy a centralized, distributed or hybrid VOD architecture.
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Collaborating for Dollars: Service Creation Community Pilots IP-TV
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The stage is set for service providers to start making money. A group of aggressive industry leaders—Microsoft, Siemens, Oracle, net.com and Accenture among them—that banded together last year to found the Service Creation Community have launched a pilot deployment called"IP Video Content With Defined QoS" . Here are some lessons learned so far.
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The Role of Middleware in Triple Play Networks: Enabling Operations
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As service providers increasingly focus on the operational efficiency aspects of their telco video networks, solution providers have shifted toward the standardization of video system components, particularly the middleware element. One meaningful tactic for middleware vendors to accomplish this is to build software based on open standards.
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For a Triple Play Over Copper, Just Add IP
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Studies show that service bundling is key to customer retention. Customers that buy more than one service from a provider have more longevity than single-service subscribers, and those that buy three or more services become very difficult for competitors to displace. Thus, the notion of"triple-play" services—bundling voice, data, and on-demand video—is extremely attractive to carriers. How can carriers most effectively offer triple-play and other services? Through the use of IP DSLAMs, telcos can lower OpEx and CapEx, reduce time to market, and offer the value-added services that attract subscribers.
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The Holy Telco Grail: Service Bundling Success With an Improved Back-Office
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With respect to services, many telcos have articulated what is essentially a Wal-Mart strategy –"if we offer an attractive choice of services in all markets, people will adopt them". But this strategy represents a dangerous assumption that bundling alone is sufficient to retain profitable customers. However, given the complexity of most telcos' operating systems, it's not surprising that they focus most of their attention on getting services to market. Most back-office operations are a messy mix of intertwined systems that present numerous constraints. To maximize the results of a video service offering, or to properly leverage partnerships with video service providers, telcos need to focus on several critical areas that demonstrate how an improved operations environment will lead to better customer segmentation, service, and retention.
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Successful Billing in the Triple Play Network
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Developing an effective plan for customer management and billing is critical to supporting a variety of services with different levels of programming, bundled services with single bills, personalized services, and real-time subscriber interactivity.
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