Focusing on the user: Maximising broadband revenues with triple-play services

Service innovation is a top priority within the service provider community, and video services are at the top of that list. Video delivery generates the most lucrative form of service innovation and revenue generation, for both wireline and wireless service providers. Four service categories - video messaging, video telephony and surveillance, video download and broadcast video - generate new opportunities for service creation and differentiation. Service providers interested in entering the video market face three significant challenges: Beyond establishing a brand identity as a video player, competitive entrants must undertake awareness and education efforts, to accompany new product launches. These telecommunications players must negotiate and secure mutually beneficial partnerships within the content community, to deliver a robust value proposition. Legacy infrastructure challenges must be addressed, requiring planned network upgrades to satisfy traffic growth projections. Accordingly, a phased approach that allows new entrants to gain a competitive foothold and gradually increase network and market capabilities, in pursuit of penetration goals, optimises the juxtaposition between gaining speed-to-market and ultimately delivering competitively differentiable services. To deliver true user-centric video services requires a fundamentally open network design, and achieving that open design must be a key consideration during all of the phases of a service provider's evolution. The ideal design is an open service delivery platform, an end-to-end framework offering mobile and fixed video telephony and content solutions, including: rapid service creation and risk mitigation, so that service providers can enter the market aggressively; mobile video solutions with optimised quality across multiple networks, from GPRS to UMTS, giving service providers a jump-start in delivering video entertainment to mobile devices; and integration of fixed and mobile applications, offering service providers a truly differentiable position, by elevating the recently hyped `quadruple play' beyond simple billing discounts. By offering users increasing control over video entertainment content and providing accessibility to content and contacts through various forms of interactive communication, service providers will successfully capitalise on critical trends driving consumer adoption.