Frozen Video on Demand Slows My Mojo

Boy, was my wife mad at me. She wanted a quiet night in, just the two of us, with a DVD and a bottle of wine, and even told me which DVD to pick up from the store.

But hey, why bother driving to the store when my service provider had been advertising this same movie on VOD, even offering it at half off to people like me who subscribe to their premium movie channels. So we chilled out, opened the wine, and then the evening turned into a disaster.

It wasn’t that the movie was bad or that I nodded off several times (not unusual on a Friday; it was just unwatchable as the picture kept freezing at the most inopportune moments. No matter how many times I rewound it, we were not going to see that movie in one smooth, uninterrupted viewing that evening.

Marketing had done its work in creating the demand for the movie among my service provider’s customers; unfortunately, the network wasn’t able to cope.

Traditionally, insights into network resources were delivered using static thresholding tools – like a single camera shot of two people in scene. Such tools alerted service providers when a threshold was breached, and these were set up from experience and based on a range of assumptions related to network utilization. In the old service environment, this approach was sufficient, as resources were dedicated to individual services.

Today’s environment is far more dynamic, with new services being launched continually – like an action film, where ever more sophisticated camera angles and editing is required. This makes it much harder for service providers to forecast capacity consumption, and static thresholding was simply not designed to handle this type of environment.

Service providers now need far greater visibility of network resources, capacity and consumption in order to build and plan next-generation networks efficiently. However, the information needed to make efficient just-in-time build out decisions is likely to be spread across various systems and there may be little aggregation. The result is suboptimal decisions on when to upgrade or deploy resources, how much capacity is really needed and where this capacity needs to be added. Inevitably, this has negative impacts on both capital spending and resource availability for future services.

Rather than just over-deploying resources and hoping these will do, a more effective approach to proactive capacity management is enabled by intelligent trending. This ensures that decisions are based on a consolidated view of network capacity consumption and its utilization, while trending future consumption. With this insight, network planners can see where they are running out of capacity, when they might hit a specified threshold, how much time is left to take action and which parts of the network are experiencing the greatest growth. Accurate network planning will save service providers money and keep their customers satisfied. Beyond that, the ability to link network performance, utilization and planning to the BSS world – to the customer who is or may be impacted – is critical to providing proactive customer service; something almost mandatory when I, as a consumer, can select so many service providers for the same basic set of services. Imagine if I received a call before the movie failed offering me a credit or discount?

It will also save me some cash, as my wife insisted I take her out to her favorite and very expensive restaurant to make up for not getting to watch her movie, when she wanted to watch it!

Mike Couture is head of global marketing for Amdocs, where he leads the company’s global team of marketing professionals in the areas of market research and insight, product marketing, marketing communications, corporate marketing, regional marketing and account-based marketing.