SureWest, Paul Bunyan Telephone Tackle IPTV Challenges

With an integrated, smoothly working back office in place, PBT can start looking at additional in-band services to run over its video channels. Two that come first to mind are a bill management TV channel and an interactive real estate channel that goes beyond a showcase of homes. Of the two, the billing channel is the closest to fruition, Anderson said.

“The ‘manage your bills’ channel is going to be unique because we’re going to have to have a Web server in the middle so when you pull up your billing channel it will take the MAC (media access control) address, figure out which customer is assigned to that address, do a database dig and pull out information to present to the customer,” he said. “You’ll have all these pieces working together in the back office.”

PBT is still in the initial phases of the bill management option, Anderson said. The same for the real estate channel, although he sees change required there. “When real estate was doing well the channel was doing well, but now that real estate has fallen off the cliff we’re looking for ways to make that channel more interactive,” he said.

Anderson takes a more conventional view of his all-IP operation. “It’s made life a lot easier because I can have Minerva talk to the billing system if I want to. I don’t have to put a bunch of different extensions in the middle,” he said.

It helps, he said, to have the ETI software entrenched in the back office because “whenever we bring something new into the field — and granted, we pay them a good chunk of money to do it — they still try to make everything as transparent and painless as possible for us.”

Anderson agrees with Riley that the changed telco space, including video, is not that tough to pull off.

“It’s more complex than it was 10 years ago when all we did was telco and didn’t have to worry about everything else,” he said, but, “you’re using the same interfaces [and] can add a service like HBO or the DVR service by adding on a little billing code and the whole thing aggregates to the network. It’s great versus having to do it all by hand.”

Things will stay great, too, if telcos take their time and realize change is made one small step at a time, Majors concluded. “Minerva spent a lot of time understanding the IPTV BSS or OSS processes. They really fall outside the scope of the BSS or OSS systems that most telcos have,” he said.

Minerva, Majors said, has developed IPTV middleware “so an operator can either manage the whole system with less people or do things that they’ve always wanted to do very quickly to manage new subscribers or add new packages or change channel lineups. We put a lot of effort into the back-office functionality of the middleware.”