ShareMobile TV - Price It, Sell It, Bill It!
The mobile phone is no longer a simple means of staying connected. With the evolution of mobile technology, millions of users fulfill their real-time information and entertainment needs with this simple device these days. It has grown to be an extension of an individual’s business environment and personal life, almost.
For the operator, this translates to exciting and challenging times ahead -- intense competition to win and retain customer share, efforts to consolidate and increase margins, to embrace emerging technologies and to launch new services for increasing ARPU -- it's all in the game.
In order to keep pace with these challenges, operators are constantly developing new non-voice data services, which offer scope for a plethora of mobile applications and value-added services.
Mobile TV, industry pundits predict, could be the 'killer application' in this paradigm.
Though the initial buzz around mobile TV has been rather lukewarm outside Japan and Korea, with the availability of handsets and technology, Europe and North America are catching up with several deployments. Datamonitor predicts mobile TV will have 155.6 million subscribers worldwide by the end of 2012, up from around 4.4 million in 2006. Mobile video revenues in the U.S. totaled $146 million in Q1 2007, growing 198 per cent year-over-year.
Novelty, pricing and the ability to match consumers' tastes and preferences with the bouquet of offerings are the key challenges for operators who are providing mobile TV service. With fuzzy standards and myriad pricing models, the going becomes tougher for them. The only way out of this is to take control of the price bands they put on content -- the right price for the right content to the right customers is the need of the hour.
As high-value content is delivered at a premium to customers through mobile TV, tapping the revenue efficiently achieves unparalleled significance for the operator, since missing even a single usage record can lead to erosion in the total revenue accumulated.
Similarly, the success of service providers will depend on how they attract customers by bringing in a suitable portfolio of video services.
Thus, the main challenges of a billing system in the mobile TV scenario are twofold - ensure optimal revenue tapping from high-value content services, and make the content revenue settlements among the operator and partners accurate and fully transparent.
The billing system has to seamlessly interface and communicate with various elements in the service delivery platforms like the video server, middleware, DRM and AAA. These interfaces should allow provisioning of on-demand and interactive services to the customers. Authenticated usage records need to be fully captured through a rule-driven mediation layer and fed to the rating engine. The usage/event records should then be attached with appropriate charges depending on the service and the customer profile. The charge attached should depend on the content, context, time-of-use/download, content provider, location, QoS, etc.
The system should effectively plug revenue leakage by authenticating the usage records before the rating engine attaches charges as per the service provider’s business rules.
The billing system also needs to provide a consolidated view of all the products offered and help the operator to derive effective and attractive cross-product bundles and discounts personalized for customers and customer segments. Self-care portals for customers to manage self-provision and to initiate payments for the services, could be a bonus.
On the partners' side, the billing system, apart from generating adequate log reports and reconciliation, should provide for a complete service delivery chain view to enable effective management of the various service level agreements and revenue-sharing contracts with each of the content providers.
If a mobile TV operator wants to enjoy the fruits of the lucrative market, apart from the service delivery platform, he needs an efficient and effective billing system. The operator needs to understand the strategic importance of a billing system in this more or less commoditized marketplace and identify it as a key differentiator that enables competency.
So, as an operator, the next time when you go that extra mile to make sure that your customer does not miss his favorite TV show, ensure that you are getting paid for it too!