article page
| 1
| 2
| 3
| 4
|
Amongst the many expressed opinions about the Internet, there are signs that the fundamental business issues have begun to receive public attention. A good example is the following quote from a traditional television broadcaster on the importance of their on-line consumers receiving their OTT programs with a high quality of experience:
"Nothing can be more debilitating than having a
bad experienceand no one gets the ad"
Albert Cheng, EVP Digital Media, ABC At the risk of stating the obvious, this quote sums up the challenge of ad-funded content distributed over the Internet: if the on-line experience is bad, consumers don't see the ad and the content owner doesn't get paid.
|
|
Managed On-line Services expand the opportunities and business models for service providers as facilitators of value that is exchanged amongst consumers and partners. |
|
run them. While most networking protocols and users respect the Internet community's spirit of sharing a common resource equally, a single P2P application presents itself on the network as being up to 100 separate applications and, in aggregate, takes a disproportionate allocation of bandwidth. Furthermore, file sharing enthusiasts often run P2P applications unattended thereby generating non-stop traffic volumes on the Internet. Consequently, the benefit of adding more bandwidth may not be realized by the majority of users. And without a
|
|
|
|
Given all this, the question remains: what is an appropriate response by Service Providers to OTT?
Initial attempts to manage the growing OTT phenomena have had mixed results at best. Some operators chose to preserve the status quo by augmenting the Internet's best-effort congestion management system with course-level traffic throttling of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic, a key distribution protocol for OTT video. This "cost control" strategy was greeted with negative publicity due to the discriminatory nature of traffic shaping generally and the control service providers' exercise in determining which traffic is "good" vs "bad." Furthermore, it's a negative proposition for service providers who are essentially spending money to stop consumers from using the network services they're fundamentally in business to sell.
Adding more bandwidth is another approach taken and is often the default starting point for many operators. Alas, this approach too has it's limitations due primarily to the way P2P protocols work and the way power users
|
|
corresponding increase in revenue, there comes a point where adding more is no longer financially sustainable.
Neither of these approaches embrace OTT video as an opportunity. They're either a negative proposition (i.e., cost control) and/or have issues of business sustainability and benefit realization. Service providers need another option and applying managed service concepts to broadband content provides such. Adding a portfolio of managed on-line services to the triple play service offering gives consumers – and other key actors in the value chain – freedom and choice to choose the experience they want. There are no regulatory barriers preventing operators from offering managed services for either business or residential customers. Furthermore, TPSDA provides the required infrastructure constructs to deliver a managed on-line service that is fully compliant with the principles of net neutrality.
article page
| 1
| 2
| 3
| 4
| |
|
