Creating a roadmap for the development of
sustainable
IPTV-based services
a thinkpiece from pjb
Associates
OK, you
know your company has to move towards developing IPTV-based services but
which way do you go in order achieve this?
The
“land-grab” rush has already started telcos, ISPs and a few new players are
already in the race. Technical infrastructure upgrades and the end of
financial re-structuring mean that the cable companies are either ahead of
the race in some regions of the world or are just off the starting line in
other regions. The satellite pay-TV service providers are starting to see
their often first move competitive advantage become eroded and are starting
to think about how to use broadband.
The
Hollywood studios are in deep negotiations with all these players, but
happily holding the cards and determining their cut of the revenue streams –
high enough to ensure that it does not under-cut their DVD market and lower
enough to ensure that the video-on-demand service providers will hardly make
any revenue from this stream. It may reduce broadband churn and maintain
ARPU but not create new value-added revenue streams.
So
which direction do you go to create these new value added services? Here are
six things to consider: -
Understand your customers
- Think about your existing of your potential customers? What are their
lifestyles? What communities are they part of? Everyone has multiple
communities of interest that may last a few hours at a concert, many years
for a particular passion and a lifetime with friends and relations. Tap into
these communities of interest, design and market your offerings around them.
Capture your customers’ needs and wants
– With existing and future users do you have customer management systems in
place to capture their needs and desires and aggregate these wants so that
you can rapidly identify market opportunities for offering value added
services? Do your customer call centres have the tools and skills to turn
complaints and comments from non-productive interactions into productive
ones that not only help to collect knowledge of needs and wants, but enable
them to sell value added services? Do your customers have access to
self-service help systems that are easy to use but not frustrating to use?
Empower your customers
– The interactively offered through broadcast TV and the wide open web-based
environment of the Internet has enabled customers to have control over a
vast amount of content so what is different about your offerings? Create an
environment that enables them to easily personalise and customise your
offerings to their needs and enable them to produce and publish their own
content. There should be flexibility to enable people to start with a simple
user environment, yet add components, so that it can be customised for their
needs.
Increase quality time
- You will be competing for people’s time which is increasingly becoming
very important for many people. Create an environment that enables them to
have what they want around their areas or communities of interest thus
enabling them to use their time more efficiently.
Pick and mix
– have the ability to easily pick and mix video-rich content around
communities of interest and also additional applications as consumers demand
additional services beyond just video-on demand. Is your sales team totally
integrated within your customer management and technical teams to enable
needs to be rapidly identified and implemented?
Plug and Play
– enable current and future application software, middleware and hardware to
be easily plug and play so that you can adapt it quickly and easily to your
system so you can cater for increased or changing demands from your users.
Do you have a culture of “yes, we can” amongst your technical staff? Can you
second source components and thus keep costs down? Do you have quality of
experience measurement systems in place linked to service level agreements?
Overall, what you are going to need to do is to differentiate your services
and content offerings from all the other players entering the game. This
will require you to be agile and flexible in order to quickly adapt to your
customers needs. This is going to need a change of thinking from the more
traditional top-down approach. However, all this will create complexities
from concept through design onto implementation and full skill-deployment.
Is your
roadmap flexible enough to deal with and take advantage of rapid changes in
market developments?
This paper - a thinkpiece - has been produced by Peter
J. Bates, Senior Partner of pjb Associates. The aim of this thinkpiece
is to stimulate discussion and thinking around these emerging issues.
If you think that pjb Associates can further help your
company or organisation better understand these issues and the software
tools available please contact
us.
You may freely distribute this thinkpiece so long as you acknowledge its
source. It can also be found at
http://www.pjb.co.uk/thinkpiece6.htm . Further thinkpieces will be
available at:
http://www.pjb.co.uk/thinkpieces.htm
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Contact Senior Partner - Peter Bates for a
discussion by email pjb@pjb.co.uk or
telephone +44 1353 667973
