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As was dreamt only by sci-fi thinkers and movie-makers till yesterday, you can now in reality, pause and rewind your favorite TV soap, view a soccer game through multiple camera angles and also watch prime content on your preferred individualized channels. IPTV means two-way communication - putting the customer where he belongs - in the driver’s seat!
Earlier, you had no choice but to keep surfing channels and still not find what you want, when you want. With IPTV, you request a program from the electronic TV guide and the program is delivered to you. Here, the entire range of program content is not directly sent to your home; instead it is loaded on to the network. When you demand for a particular program, only that segment is streamed to your TV, thus saving valuable bandwidth. All you need to do is to connect your TV to a set-top box that decodes the IP video and converts it into standard television signals. If a modem is added to the set-top box, it will provide a range of interactive services, including voice, email, games, shopping, information, and even betting! Now, that makes IPTV truly irresistible.
According to a recent analysis by Infonetics Research, corporations plan to invest close to $26 billion by 2009 in building systems to take hold of a slice of service revenues, predicted to be worth $38 billion in the IPTV space then. Infonetics Research predicts that the number of IPTV subscribers worldwide will rocket to 53 million by 2009. Other industry experts have more modest expectations of the size of the IPTV user population. A case in point is the Diffusion Group, which predicts around 34 million subscribers worldwide by 2010.
While telcos are aggressively venturing into the IPTV space, the resident TV market folks - the free-to-air, the cable operators, etc. - are not too far behind. They are in no disposition to watch their primary source of revenue being taken away. Analysts on the other hand, feel that telcos are left with no choice, with their principal source of revenue - voice - now being offered by non-telco companies. Add to this the fact that major telecom companies have laid thousands of kilometers of optical fiber, criss-crossing the entire globe, from Canada to China and Iceland to Italy. However, about 90 per cent of this fiber lays ’unlit’ still: which means they have not been connected to the end-equipment yet. Now, optic fiber is expensive business and how do you think telcos would gain ROI, with this glut of bandwidth left to be monetized around the world? The answer is Internet Protocol Television or IPTV.
However, difficult challenges do exist on the technology and commercial fronts. Infrastructure challenges include the need for network elements unique to this technology, viz, video servers, Digital Rights Management systems (DRM), middleware, Conditional Access Systems (CAS), set-top boxes, IPTV network architecture, bandwidth requirements, content acquisition, etc. Nevertheless, the operational challenges are even more complex.
Add to them, challenges that include competition from other IPTV providers and established alternative pay-TV service providers and regulatory issues.
Service management is a critical part of IPTV implementations for telcos, since triple play - Voice, Video, Data - brings with it, triple the delivery concerns: differentiation with features and personalization, while keeping it simple for the user, ensuring quality, and cost optimization.
With market acceptance surging, it is only a matter of time that the investment and technology challenges of rolling out IPTV too will be mastered. The only challenge remaining is - How will IPTV service providers address management, charging and billing of the services over IP, ensuring a win-win for both customers and service providers?
Service providers need a solution that allows them to provision the triple play or even the quadruple play of services to the users and bundle them into attractive packages, and also to react to the market quickly. The error-free solution should address charging and balance management for different payment models, real-time service activation and provisioning, interactive customer self-help and management, in addition to delivering quality experience to customers and managing the innumerable SLAs from multiple entities in the content value chain.
IPTV operators need to also focus on getting the back-office in tune with their service operations. The solution should be able to process multiple usage events from different network elements during the media usage (events) and access/transfer of media into a single transaction detail record (TDR). Another challenge is determining the rates associated with each record, calculating the cost for each billing record, aggregating these records periodically to produce invoices, sending invoices to the customer, and recording payments received from the customer.
Coming back to our question - How will IPTV service providers address management, charging and billing of the services over IP, ensuring a win-win for both customers and service providers? The answer is SunTec.