Bringing the Future of TV to Life
Amdocs’s OTT Monetization Solution, a component of its CES 9 suite, helps CSPs form profitable partnerships with content and app providers. According to the ’Docs, its platform boosts the quality of service (QoS) and level of personalization of OTT streaming video and can produce a revenue bump of up to 25 percent. Last month the company announced a partnership with SeaChange International, a provider of multiscreen video software, to enable further monetization of multiscreen video.
Ericsson purchased Mediaroom, a widely used IPTV platform, from Microsoft in early April, and ever since, video news has been streaming forth (pardon the pun) from the Swedish company. Mediaroom is a big grab for Ericsson: it’s the platform used by such leading CSPs as AT&T (via U-verse), Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Telus, and Swisscom.
In a press release announcing the acquisition, Per Borgklint, senior vice president and head of business unit support solutions, explained why a mobile network equipment manufacturer (NEM) like Ericsson would spend big bucks on video: “Ericsson’s vision of the Networked Society foresees 50 billion devices to be connected via broadband, mobility and cloud. Future video distribution will have a similar impact on consumer behavior and consumption as mobile voice has had.”
Once subscribers have total access to the wide world of video on any device, how can they quickly find what they want to watch? Enter advanced discovery and recommendation, one of the strategies that’s helped make Amazon and Netflix so successful. If video is to be smart, personalized and easy to use, it must quickly serve up recommendations that are relevant to each consumer.
There are several solutions available, such as a video discovery platform from Digitalsmiths that offers personalized search and recommendations and incorporates social trending, mood-based discovery and a rules engine to provision streams for the many different types of connected devices used by subscribers. As you can see in figure 2, making use of social-trending data enables service providers to recommend the most relevant video to any subscriber at any time of day.
Source: Digitalsmiths, 2013
All of these disparate video streams must be delivered in an economical yet rapid fashion over networks that are increasingly congested, creating an ongoing challenge for the people holding the pipes. For CSPs to profitably deliver next-gen video, they must leverage solutions that optimize their network resources and enable swift provisioning of new services. In light of the massive demand for streaming video, many providers of network monitoring and management solutions have evolved their products to specifically address the needs of next-generation video. Incognito Software, for example, offers solutions that, in addition to the usual monitoring and managing of network resources, provision services for multiple device types and handle multiplay service fulfillment.
