Mastering the Video Challenge

Video excites everyone. Language, images, motion, drama – video is an enormously powerful communications tool.

For moving our hearts, nurturing our minds, stimulating our memories and imagination, there is nothing quite like video communications. This generation is witness to something truly new: The Age of Video communications is just now being born. The next decade will see an explosion that will reduce the developments between Charlie Chaplin and the iPod to mere preamble. IPTV will change everything.

Service providers, correctly, see huge opportunity in this accelerating torrent of traffic. The growth of revenues tied to video services will be breathtaking. The video market is estimated to be a quarter of a trillion dollars by 2015 – just a few short years away.

Video communications is powerful globally. Every culture has embraced video. As IPTV and related technologies methodically destroy the bottlenecks that have limited video communications to date, the global nature of the service-provider opportunity is becoming increasingly clear.

The question for service providers is not, therefore, one of identifying an opportunity. The question is simply whether they can support the services in the volumes that will be required. I can put the question another way, more directly.

Will service providers’ back offices be strong enough to carry the new weight?

B/OSS has published an exclusive Report on this subject. Titled “The Back Office Takes Its Turn in the IPTV Life Cycle," the Report is written by B/OSS Editor-in-Chief Tim McElligott and underwritten by CHR Solutions. The Report is free.

McElligott explores the inside story behind the service providers’ approach to the IPTV opportunity. Among the aspects of the story he explores are:

• How Microsoft’s Mediaroom, somewhat surprisingly, carved out its position as the market leader
• The challenge’s underlying Mediaroom
• The path to success that SureWest is pursuing

The Report goes into much more detail. If you are invested in how service providers are pursuing the video grail, this B/OSS Report is must-read journalism, a prime example of the quality work McElligott and B/OSS produce.

People behave repetitively. To master complexity, people simplify. We reduce major changes, entire epochs of history, to the names of just a few people.

The Italian Renaissance: DaVinci and Michaelangelo. The Enlightenment: Voltaire. Print: Gutenberg. Voice: Bell and Marconi. The personal digital device: Jobs.

The seminal figures of the Age of Video have yet to emerge. We know one certainty about the Age of Video: Service providers worldwide will be at the center of whatever comes of this next great age of communications.

People behave repetitively. Until they don’t. Until something big changes, and entirely new things are born, suddenly, from the rough clay of their antecedents.

When Gutenberg automated print, he moved the written word from the province of a tiny minority of people into the first mass communications vehicle, forever transforming human societies. People are about to leave the video manuscript stage and move to video automation, with similar consequences.

Today, global service providers are at the crossroads of history. Are their back offices strong enough to meet history’s test?

E-mail me at llannon@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.