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where’s the value in today’s advanced billing systems? It’s in the data. This is where I think the BSS sector is starting to get it right. When you’re looking at all of the transactions- whether they are billed to the end user or not – you’ve got the keys to the kingdom. Everyone wants to know what people are doing online, with their TVs, and with their mobile devices and how to segment people into identifiable audiences. That’s where business intelligence, or analytics, becomes extremely powerful.
Advertisers especially want to know this information. As they advertise more through services like online video, they want to target and tailor their ads and measure their effectiveness. Hulu is trying to do this already. When I see an ad on Hulu, it asks me to give it a thumbs-up or down so it can tailor ads to me. That relies on my cooperation though, and as Pipeline’s publisher and editors can tell you, I’m often not very cooperative. I don’t even sign-in when I use Hulu. I just use it.
Call me a rebel.
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This approach doesn’t fundamentally change billing, it just steers it into the flow of where the industry is headed. |
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not saying SCTE 130 isn’t valuable. It’s just the aspects of it that deal with understanding user behavior are even more valuable than the parts that deal with ad delivery through legacy set-top infrastructure. Those aspects are things many off-the-shelf billing solutions can already provide.
One Tidy Package
While pondering this rant as I walked through the exhibits at 4G World, I had a sit down meeting with Manish Gupta, vice president of global marketing and Sukki Sandhar, head of service aware solutions for Kabira Technologies. Gupta and Sandhar essentially agreed with me that we can’t go backwards – unlimited plans are here to stay. They did argue, however, that per-use charging will, for example, allow mobile operators to access greater portions of their
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My cable operator, however, already knows who and where I am. That means they have something to offer to Hulu that’s valuable to Hulu’s advertisers. They’re in the revenue chain, they’re just not taking advantage of their position. This doesn’t violate Net-Neutrality, because they’re not stopping me from doing anything. Instead, they can be a key enabler providing connectivity to the end user and intelligence about me. I may not be billed for watching Hulu, but billing technology could know a lot about what I’m doing and how often.
This approach doesn’t fundamentally change billing, it just steers it into the flow of where the industry is headed. Further, it doesn’t require a full blown SCTE 130 implementation to make this customer- and service-awareness happen. Billing, mediation and analytics systems can already do this stuff today. I’m
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customer base with data and application services. Unlimited plans, as they stand, can be overkill for a large percentage of the customer base. Plus, data subscribers make up a small minority of wireless users, but that minority contributes a disproportionately large percentage of revenue.
Generally I agree with Gupta and Sandhar’s point of view as far as it applies to the mobile sector. If someone doesn’t want to subscribe to a data plan, then giving that person access on a fair pay-per-use basis makes sense. We’ve seen this with text messaging where budget-concerned users will pay for text as an alternative to voice. Generally speaking, with more payment and pricing flexibility, it’s possible to build service penetration in parts of the market that aren’t going to go all-in for monthly data, applications, and messaging
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