Saturday, June 17, 2006

Analysis of IPTV Global Market

Triple Play is no longer just a revenue enhancer, but a must for long term survival. Therefore telecom companies must devise a VoD / IPTV strategy. The ability of cable operators to quickly add voice to their service mix is a major threat to local telcos. With competition for core voice services coming from multiple fronts, telcos already face real prospects of accelerated revenue erosion.

Instead of plain triple play telcos should go for blended triple play where all the services would be blended together and would be interoperable resulting in ease for the end consumer. For example the consumer should get the flexibility to schedule its entertainment (limited to broadcasting channels and VoD) over the broadband. Moreover the voice service should be blended with video. Internet should be accessible from the TV by adopting a “Walled Garden” approach. Reliance is trying to blend the telephone, data and video together during its pilot, although in a limited fashion. Find examples & graph to support.

Telcos must become involved in the creation of content and services. Those that do not take an active role will be reduced to just the operators of “dumb pipe”. They certainly don’t have to become media businesses but they need to become media savvy. They must learn to partner people in the value chain. Find examples & graph to support.

IP is emerging as the telco’s most critical weapon in a showdown with cable competitors. All service providers can become triple-play providers, leveraging multi-service IP access solutions to provide voice, video and data over a common platform. Although worldwide many telcos have failed in the past to compete effectively with cable operators as video providers but the ongoing trend towards switched digital video services could favor the telco that understand switched services well and most important fat is that they have well established (in many cases integrated also) operations on massive scale to support switched services. For example Airtel is already experimenting with integrated solutions of pre-convergence era (mobile, fixed and DSL). All three services will be handled through integrated operations like sales force, customer care as well as billing.

Twenty is the magic number. Operators world wide are finding that a minimum of 20 Mbit/s is required to enable a compelling triple-play offer over DSL. This will guide network engineering projects and vendor solutions for DSL in coming years.

Emphasis / Interest on Triple Play are clear indications that telcos are rediscovering the importance of consumer market. Although telcos still consider corporate segments more lucrative than mass segment but now they realize that the continued erosion of bread and butter business could be fatal. Triple play can be a solution to stem that erosion.

Ability to increase ARPU by 100 percent is driving renewed interest in video. Mobile and fixed line services have already acquired a commodity status in most part of the world. Broadband services would be acquiring the commodity status in the near future. Currently only VoD is the only service that can offer the 100% effect on top-line growth for telecom providers.

Telecom Operators are far apart on their plans for Triple Play infrastructure. Here we can discuss about different access networks and compression techniques adopted by the service providers

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