Best known for supplying mediation and transactional intelligence solutions to telecom service providers, Openet said this week at the Cable Show that after two years of behind-the-scenes work, the company now has five North American cable operators as customers.
These operators weren’t named, but Openet said they are using the company’s solutions, particularly its FusionWorks Convergent Mediation solution to gain visibility into subscriber use of video, voice and data services and develop the customer intelligence capabilities that will help them compete.
Michael Manzo, chief marketing officer at Openet, said there is an ongoing evolution toward a more dynamic infrastructure, offering increasingly personalized services and content and developing sophisticated business models. “Recognizing the value of subscriber and network data to gain complete user and service visibility is the logical, but pioneering, first step,” he said.
Video in particular presents new challenges to developing a full view of the customer. From collecting and correlating video usage to measuring and monetizing click-throughs, the first step toward understanding TV viewing and usage is visibility. Cable operators have turned to Openet to provide a more interactive viewing experience by collecting tuning and click-stream information from a variety of video sources, including Video On Demand (VOD), Switched Digital Video (SDV) and Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) applications with a unified platform. By gaining comprehensive visibility into viewing data of subscribers, cable operators can personalize, and ultimately improve, the user experience.
Openet’s Transactional Intelligence solutions allow the ability to gain visibility into network usage, dynamically control network resources and monetize network activities and supports initiatives across video, data and voice services, such as DOCSIS 3.0 migrations, Addressable Advertising initiatives and subscriber rights management in linear, on-demand and SDV environments.
This marks Openet’s official entrance into the cable space. Openet plans to replicate its wireless industry success. It has developed a new set of solutions for the cable space that it will be introducing over the coming months. These new solutions will include Audience & Engagement Measurement, Convergent Usage Measurement and Interactive Services Fulfillment. All are built on the FusionWorks platform.
“Globally, cable operators are in the midst of evolving to a more sophisticated infrastructure that promises to increase revenue and profitability while better serving their subscribers. Openet’s Transactional Intelligence solutions fill the void of intelligent, actionable data for cable providers,” Manzo said.
The Audience & Engagement Measurement solution will enable MSOs to measure subscriber activities across all video services, including linear and non-linear viewing data and click-streams associated with interactive television (iTV) initiatives. They can collect, aggregate, enrich and distribute usage data and subscriber profile information in real-time to deliver more personalized services and highly targeted marketing.
The Interactive Services Fulfillment solution allows them to collect interaction information from EBIF and tru2way applications and forward the data to a fulfillment server, in order to respond to real-time subscriber requests. With this solution, TV’s end goal has arrived: to enable interactive services, such as request for more information (RFI), voting/polling, T-commerce and telescoping, to offer a personalized, Web-like user experience through television.
Convergent Usage Measurement enables service providers to capture, collect and aggregate data and voice usage, and distribute the data to downstream systems. With Openet’s support for convergent networks, MSOs can now collect data across different service platforms. This enables business intelligence initiatives, and ensures that data can be used not only for real-time responses, but to create new revenue streams.
