Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 1

	This Month's Issue:
	Cableco vs. Telco

Service Fulfillment to Span the Gaps
in Advanced Video Services

article page | 1 | 2 | 3 |

profile that can provide a reference point for the fulfillment process. Fulfillment has to execute decisions on the fly that are dictated by customer permissions and policies relating to how different products and services are delivered, for example. Centralizing that information not only enables the real-time process, it also helps support a more streamlined product definition process. A centralized source of customer information is also critical to targeting specific customer segments with “personalized” promotions and advertisements.

As services become more diverse and include hard goods components, integration with third parties becomes a major requirement, as does an extension to the traditional service catalog. Service catalogs will need to be extensible so they can manage services with many components and sub-components that include electronic and tangible third-party products and services. Managing this kind of a micro-supply chain is what enables comprehensive lifestyle sorts of package offerings.

Make Advertising and Interactivity Easier

In the advertising realm, MSOs and CSPs both want to open up more avenues to specific subscriber segments, collect more information that identifies and qualifies their audience, and get a better grip on what people want to see or buy. Initially, this might just involve better targeting of existing adverts, but ultimately it will leverage narrowcasting schemes so that time slots can be sold multiple times and viewers can opt in and out of specific types of ads. Advanced forms of advertising will have their own complex fulfillment requirements and, for example, interactive promotions will be coupled directly with real-time fulfillment processes. The architecture that enables targeted, real-time, and interactive advertising delivery is dependent on centralized customer and service information being available for collection, analysis, correlation, and reporting to support its processes.

Synchronization between the real-time environment and back-office operations will also become a bigger challenge. New information and changes to subscriber profiles will be generated at an accelerating pace as there are more data collection demands from analytics and more transactions viewers can conduct. These changes impact CRM and billing systems that are part of customer service and support processes.

Synchronization between the real-time environment and back-office operations will also become a bigger challenge.

For example, changes from billing relating to customers’ account status also need to be communicated seamlessly into the fulfillment process. Real-time service fulfillment depends on communication with billing and charging mechanisms as part of the authentication process. Service fulfillment will execute billable events. In many cases, those events needs to be verified or authenticated with a credit card charge or account debit transaction. The record of the user’s purchase – the service fulfillment history – also needs to be fed into analytics processes that help to drive up-sales and targeted marketing. This puts a premium on any solution’s ability to maintain data integrity between what’s happening in the real-time environment and what the back office knows before, during, and after the fact.

In the video world, service fulfillment will enable more complex services to be triggered from the remote. These will combine multiple components from different parties – like order a free sample of a new dishwasher detergent through an interactive TV promotion. One button push can set off multiple fulfillment chains and information exchanges. Service fulfillment needs to open up authorization, entitlement, policy, and services information to third-party partners. Whether those partners are offering applications or hard goods, it needs to be easy for them to on-board new products and access service components they want to bundle with their own. This is a really big gap that service fulfillment needs to span in order to deliver the kinds of interactive video service and advertising environments OpenCable, Tru2Way, and IPTV have promised.

article page | 1 | 2 | 3 |

© 2006, All information contained herein is the sole property of Pipeline Publishing, LLC. Pipeline Publishing LLC reserves all rights and privileges regarding
the use of this information. Any unauthorized use, such as copying, modifying, or reprinting, will be prosecuted under the fullest extent under the governing law.