Tara Seals Blog: The Age of Now

I just watched the 1944 holiday classic “Meet Me in Saint Louis,"  the one with Judy Garland and “The Trolley Song" and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." And what really struck me was a scene where the older sister is waiting to get a phone call, long-distance, from New York. It’s pre-arranged; she waits all day for 6 p.m. to arrive. And when the call comes through, it’s impossible to hear each other, but her beau on the other end of the phone says, “Isn’t it wonderful — it’s like you’re in the same room!"

Granted, the scene is supposed to take place at the turn of the century, but nonetheless the very idea of waiting hours and hours to speak to someone is simply insane in today’s conception. But more importantly, the idea of waiting for anything, communications-wise, is nearly unheard of.

I would like to update my Facebook status now, please. And I can — through my handset. I want access to “Meet Me in St. Louis" on-demand now, without waiting for AMC to trot it out during Christmas week. The ever more transactional nature of how we live our lives — texts and tweets and blog updates and TV Everywhere and video sharing and on and on and on — we are living, my friends, in the age of nowism.

And that means that operators are going to need to rethink their monetization strategies. Consumers and businesses alike are embracing mobile broadband, ever more video and an array of personalized applications and content, regardless of location or device, in order to be more useful, productive and entertained. This changing consumption model means that service providers have an opportunity to transition their roles from delivering siloed, discrete, network-based services to becoming an integral part of the very fabric of end-user lives and livelihoods. In fact, their most lucrative future opportunities lie in doing just that.

As operators worldwide build out the IP-enabled, broadband networks required to feed this new consumption model, the true opportunity for monetizing that investment lies in engaging the customer in the way that the customer would like to be engaged, across all manner of screens and form factors, from the TV in the living room to the PC to the mobile device, and even down to the telepresence screen at the office or the pixel display at a retail store. Whereas the operator has always had a relationship with the house, business or a specific device, going forward the relationship will be more personalized, directly with the end user.

So, implementing quotas and offering speed-based billing really isn’t going to cut it. This reality will be driving billing investments for the next year, and we take a look at some strategies for innovative new business models that will make the most of those investments in our cover story.  At the heart is a movement to real-time, converged, dynamic charging models and the attendant policy integration that will be required.

So welcome to 2011. As a crowd in one scene in “Meet Me in St. Louis" sings, excited about the brand-new invention of the streetcar: “Clang clang clang goes the trolley, ding ding ding goes the bell." I’m feeling pretty clang-y and ding-y about 2011. And I rejoice that the era of using a telegraph to schedule expensive, rare telephone calls is firmly in the past.