Self-Provisioning, Self-Care Could Be the IPTV Differentiator
Susana Schwartz
08/01/2005
With Yahoo's recent foray into VoIP through its purchase of Dialpad, it is clear telcos will have to transform from voice utility to multimedia entertainment if they are to compete with the likes of Yahoo!, Skype and AOL—all of which are thinking about adding VoIP features to existing services.
The lines will blur between telephony, data and video providers, as Web portals enable IM services to talk with traditional telephony networks and telcos become managers of content.
"In IPTV plays, telcos have to strive to be more like a Yahoo! than a Time Warner," says Beau Atwater, executive director, Office of the CTO, in Telcordia's New Generations Systems Group. Telcordia has been one of the more outspoken OSS players in the creation of IPTV strategies and the inception of standards development under the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS). "Carriers have to figure out how to drive consumers to comprehensive Web portals that compel them to try higher-margin video and data services," Atwater says.
The goal for widespread IPTV deployments is finding "the killer app." Already in lab environments, multiple services are combined, such as video with concurrent SMS messaging or presence technology—all of which can combine in different ways to allow customers to feel they are viewing programs "with" their friends and family, even if they are located across town or even across the globe.
There is also the possibility of enabling customers to interactively determine or change the course of the shows they view—to choose a comedic ending over a dramatic one, for instance.
Other than interactivity, IPTV also could engender a second opportunity in terms of flexible service bundles tailored to individual desires—something not being done with static broadcast packages.
Because telcos have the know-how to bundle and roll out new services faster than cable and satellite providers, they should be able to capture revenue that the cable providers miss out on.
With IPTV, telecom providers have a substantial opportunity to capitalize on the fact that they already have systems in place for automatic bill look-up, real-time charging and online service upgrades.
This is in stark contrast to cable companies, which have not been big consumers of automation software, as evidenced by static product line-ups and less than optimal CRM.
A few of the more aggressive IPTV telcos are capitalizing on those weaknesses.
Partnerships Key To Self-Provisioning, Self-Care
Telcos have only a limited window of opportunity, as cable and satellite companies will not rest on their laurels. Many have already started looking into IPTV-based set-top boxes (STBs) capable of connecting to operators' head-ends over broadband infrastructures. Cable and satellite providers can also swiftly capitalize on the fact that they possess the video encoding, broadcasting and on-demand architectures that carriers will have to scramble to attain. Whether carriers catch up through partnerships or acquisition, the race will be close: cable and satellite companies will simultaneously do what they have to in building out IP-based formats to offer IPTV-based STBs.
To gain control of content riding on STBs, carriers are rushing to form technical partnerships with platform companies such as Microsoft, Alcatel and Lucent, and with smaller players like Minerva, Myrio (now part of Siemens) and Orca. Content management from Leapstone, Orca, Cablecom and Microsoft are emerging, and OSS and billing vendors ultimately will have to work with them to understand the impact of changing video streams for on-demand services that impact bandwidth.
Access technologies and customer premises equipment alliances are spurring deeper relationships with middleware players for hardware and software support, as well as ties to upstream systems and video integrators, such as IBM and Accenture. As these relationships are hashed out, carriers are devising their strategies for integrating video offerings into core systems or building IPTV silos.
Although a few telcos have some experience in the cable business, or have had video over ATM for a few years, most lack experience with the end-to-end system integrations, APIs and codec chain equipment.
"We've seen our customers try to narrow IPTV down to four main components: video middleware, broadband access networks [DSL copper or optical network into the home through PON], CPE configuration [the modem termination for copper or optical service together with the STB in customer locations], and integration of voice with IPTV so calls can be viewed, rejected or accepted simultaneous with TV viewing," says Leonard Sheahan, director of provisioning solutions for MetaSolv.
To provision IPTV, middleware from various platform vendors will require that equipment be configured at the customer premises, as well as other devices for voice, STBs and analog terminal adapters (ATAs). That translates into a lot of access configurations and gateways to manage. After all, access could consist of VDSL (very high bit-rate DSL), ADSL2 Plus or even Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON), depending on where the access point meets the network. With CPE, there are STBs and termination units, OMTs (optical network termination units) and ATAs. In the core, there is traffic engineering and network configuration to ensure that bandwidth is available. Equipment from various vendors—Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and so on—also will be simultaneously activated.
Service Assurance
"Carriers seem to be going backward in order to go forward," says Telcordia's Atwater, explaining that most carriers have been inquiring about assurance rather than provisioning in the past few months. "That means they are willing to do the setup manually and automate the monitoring and assurance part first." He notes that Telcordia's ISCP and Service Director are taking off faster than its service creation products, such as Service Composer and Service Express.
"Carriers want to walk customers through service implementation, as they learned from ISDN that they can't just sell a service and trust people are willing to tinker with it to get it to work," says Karl Whitelock, lead strategist for the OSS Group at Agilent. "In video, any packet loss will be perceived, as customers are accustomed to high-quality pictures. There's little room for error." He notes that if HBO goes down, customers are going to blame the telco, regardless of whether or not a partner company is to blame. "Once volumes are there," says Whitelock, "any change between partners will have to be monitored to reduce the risk of lawsuits and disenchanted customers."
"The only way to understand the quality of the end service is to monitor the pipes delivering the content," Whitelock says. But where the monitors go depends on how revenue-sharing models evolve. "If the numbers on the supplier end ultimately are higher," he says, "telcos will have to closely monitor where video is degrading, because they are ultimately going to be the ones responsible for rebates, and they need to recover that cost from content providers if they are the ones responsible for poor service quality."
For now, carriers seem more interested in studying network data at the service level and evaluating the state of the service and quality of the customer experience. That information is derived from key performance and quality indicators (KPIs and KQIs) procured from application servers.
"By monitoring something like a presence server on an IM service, carriers can measure KPIs or KQIs by correlating application server statistics to those from networks, in order to gain an overall view of how a service is doing," says Atwater.
"We have carriers asking for software agents on STBs or monitoring devices in the network, so they can monitor unencrypted packets," says Whitelock. He notes that some carriers want to run parallel streams so they can look at quality through a concurrent deployment of a service.
Overall, the message is the same: Telcos are recognizing that cable companies do not consider OSS a No. 1 priority, so any maturity in this area can be an advantage in assuring the quality of IPTV.
Integrated Billing
The ability to integrate billing will also be paramount in dynamically changing product mixes. "Billing vendors will be key in terms of the success of IPTV," says Herve Utheza, principal analyst for IPTV research at the Diffusion Group, a market research firm focused on digital consumer services and technology (see Figures 1 and 2). Utheza, author of a report titled "Evaluating IPTV Vendor Strategies—From End-to-End Systems to Component Plans," believes IPTV pricing models will depend heavily whether billing systems can expand to support IPTV components.
Surprisingly, few vendors in the billing space are active in public IPTV discussions right now. Amdocs is working with Orca Interactive and Leapstone to put together a self-care and provisioning application through its fulfillment management software, which may act as a broker between content servers and OSS using workflow bus technology from Cramer.
"Billing and CRM will increasingly have to integrate with STBs and middleware to enable self-install, as the process must lead to third-party inventory systems to activate circuits. Once auto-activation occurs, there has to be some reflection of that in the bill," says Reed Majors, director of IPTV for Amdocs.
As customers upgrade or downgrade services through self-serve portals, they will want to see what billing changes are triggered by different viewing habits with IPTV. Self-provisioning and self-care portals to will have to enable views of billing information, so customers can fully understand the billing implications of changing services.
Also needed is substantial integration of billing with CRM systems. "To enable information to be partitioned and customized for each subscriber, there must exist links to CRM systems via TV- or PC-based Web portals," says Sheahan at MetaSolv. Integration of CRM will be a key to tying product catalogs to service profiles behind the services. "That will be a different exercise than VoIP, where vendors could provide portals to servers for self-management," he says. "Because IPTV is a multi-domain world, there will have to be cross-referencing of event-based activities, so that event records are streamlined and passed upstream to billing and rating engines."
Because the cost of upgrading billing and OSS with middleware can be prohibitive—as middleware touches functions involving billing, electronic program guides, interfaces to content providers and the like—mediation may take on a much bigger role with IPTV services.
"You are toast if you don't go through either the integration woes of getting billing records into platform vendors' video servers and back into billing systems to charge on a per-user basis for something like VoD, or implementing mediation solutions that work with activation systems in ‘normalizing' events, so that billing continues to operate as new equipment and services are introduced into the networks," Sheahan says.
Doing so, he says, will mean automating manual interfacing of billing and CRM systems, as well as settlement and transaction management through mediation functions. That will require carriers to open interfaces and orchestration mechanisms through workflow systems.
"Integration will happen on a per-project basis for now, as OSS architecture will require point-to-point integration," notes Peter Briscoe, senior worldwide product manager for Cramer. "The access networks have different properties—some based on PON, GPON, broadband (BPON), or gigabit Ethernet for optical." Briscoe points out that some carriers are not yet accustomed to shared infrastructures. "You can have several houses sharing bandwidth," he says, "but crude assumptions won't work if one customer wants to make on-demand changes to a high-definition TV service, as opposed to others with just ordinary telephone connections. You need to juggle content without disrupting demand profiles."
That requires intelligence that can support information related to STBs, MAC addresses, IP addresses and so on. Currently, most OSS and billing systems understand phone numbers, not digital rights management (DRM) or other IPTV components. Existing systems expect a single line, single service, without termination points or end devices.
Managing content from widely distributed boxes working in unison will be difficult for billing and OSS accustomed to handling a single switch for dial tone or voice.
To manage the combinations of authentication servers necessary for access and to extract video streams in the right order, back-office systems must handle both the main head-end extracting live TV content, and the distribution head-ends pushing that content to local access areas.
Formats will have to be converted differently for each STB. "The content relies on the number of network connections, boxes and profiles on IT systems, so understanding delivery of content is very important in assuring and provisioning," says Briscoe.
Product Catalogs
As carriers integrate operational systems and billing to interact with the multitudes of components in an IPTV infrastructure—encoders, decoders, STBs, DSLAMs, DRM and VoD systems—they will have to focus on creating robust product catalogs consisting of the types of services that will lure people away from traditional broadcast offerings.
"Product catalogs can be virtual databases populated by data about all of the components offered by various carriers, cable companies and satellite players, as well as broadband vendors and content providers," says Atwater at Telcordia.
Once information is put in a centralized location, it can be combined with DRM, encryption requirements and key quality indicators so that marketing departments can devise different bundling schemes—for example, bundling e-mail with spam protection, or presence with video—to target different segments and demographics.
With rebundling of services through Web portals, carriers' partners can then publish into the catalogs for even more extensive bundle options.
As catalogs become more robust, provisioning will take on more of a planning role, as the core and access will no longer be configured for each customer. Rather, service bundles will roll out to many customers in certain locations, with interactive services based on an understanding with each subscriber. As the content is streaming for individuals simultaneously, carriers will monitor the impact on their bandwidth. Because back-office systems are not targeted purely to IPTV, subscriber control and management, service bundling and service catalogs are going to grow out of event-based activities like gaming or be homegrown from the ground up.
Correction: In the September feature "Self-Provisioning, Self-Care Could Be the IPTV Differentiator," SureWest's triple play penetration rates were incorrectly reported. The rates should have read: 50 percent penetration for voice, video and data, and 30-percent penetration for two out of the three.
Secondly, SureWest's vendor partner is Mobile Data Systems Inc. (MDSI), not MDSA.
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