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Part I of III: TM Forum’s chief Strategy officer on Big Data

The Big Data Summit organized by TM Forum in Amsterdam was my first.
My first on Big Data - well that’s not so surprising as there haven’t been many yet - but also my first TM Forum event. That’s strange as I’ve been in and out of the Telco industry for over a decade – it was a great event so better late than never.

Before reporting on the event itself in part III (BTW you can get a preview with 50-odd tweets from my time-line @nebul2), this blog is the feedback from my discussion with Nik Willetts, chief strategy officer of the Forum. He started by reminding me who they are. Part II covers the rare demos I saw.
TM-Forum is a 25-year-old non-profit US incorporated organization with about 120 staff. It is Telco based with around a thousand member companies, a quarter of which are service providers. These operators account for a whopping great 90% of the world’s subscribers!

Nik told me this conference was in line with the general Telco movement away from pure network management towards more services. His job, and this conference in particular, are to look for the next wave of digital growth.

He sees Big Data underpinning most successful customer programs in the future. “The whole industry must become data driven, with shorter cycles so as to establish new services that can compete with the eBays or Googles of the world. Without this transformation operators will be loosing very real money. Today’s digital services are built around user experience whereas traditional Telco services are built around technology. It’s going to be about market pull or what customers perceive, where it used to be about what engineering departments pushed. Successful operators will have a deep understanding of User Experience.” Nik pointed to an example given during the conference by Cricket, where analytics were used to determine exactly where user calls were being dropped geographically and feeding that experience data to network engineering teams, thus reducing churn. “But cost reduction will also be a key driver for Big Data within service providers as a better understanding of User Experience helps operators anticipate customer issues and reduce truck rolls.”

I asked Willets what had already struck him during this event. He told me it was “different stake-holders playing multiple roles, attacking the issue from different angles. TM-Forum always tries to get different people round the table together.”

I asked about the general squeeze operators are feeling here in Europe, and whether Nik saw it as a global phenomenon or one restricted to developed markets. “TM Forum covers the whole world, so operators in developing markets have the benefit of seeing what operators in developed markets have or haven’t done successfully to cope with new threats and opportunities. That’s exactly what you can see at this Big Data event. TM Forum is instrumental in this knowledge and experience sharing”.

This is the first dedicated TM Forum event on Big Data although the subject has been covered for about 2 years within other conferences.
Willetts was happy with attendance for a launch event with over 150 delegates and 12 CxOs. The event will be replicated in a year somewhere else.
When I complemented Nik for the absence of the usual sales pitches in presentations he told me that “as with other TM Forum events, there is no pay-to-play here i.e. vendors cannot pay to get to speak. The business model is for delegate fees, sponsorship and exhibitors, with all presentations being vetted. We do allow vendors to speak alongside their customers where it adds value to the presentation, as you may have seen with the Cricket/TEOCO presentation”.

TM Forum logo 1

Part II (the exhibition) is here.

And if you want to skip straight to the conference content itself, that's here.

Stay tuned for the full write up of the event.

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CDN 3.0 White Paper

CDNs have improved in leaps and bounds in the last decade. This white paper asks if mainstream suppliers are now struggling to deliver the next big improvement. We look into whether there could be a window of opportunity for network operators to get back into the game. Live OTT streaming is considered a great catalyst for this opportunity.We finish by looking into what the future of CDN's might look like in the next few years.

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HbbTV is for real and is growing beyond its French and German birth ground

HDMI stick from Japanese startup TVF

A look at some of the demos from the December 2012 HbbTV Symposium

HbbTV has been a hot topic for a couple of years now and seems to be spreading well beyond it’s original Franco-German birth grounds, albeit still mainly within Europe for now: Spain and Scandinavia were most mentioned at this year HbbTV Symposium. Although I saw a lot of Brits at the symposium there wasn’t much mention of HbbTV activity from what seems, in this context, a remote Island territory. HD Forum’s Frédéric Tapissier invited me to the gathering that was held in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris and of course all the speakers were preaching to the quire about how great HbbTV is. So in this blog I’ll just concentrate on the real HbbTV demos that were on show. And yes it does now seem that we’re well beyond slideware: there is at last some horsepower under the HbbTV bonnet, although some of the solutions I saw, however impressive, didn’t always fix a problem I knew existed. I got to see 4 of the 6 demos on display, here’s what I saw.

IMJ is a Japanese service development company with about 800 people. In October they launched a 5 people spinoff called TVF located San Jose. Nariaki Hatta was demonstrating an HDMI Wi-Fi stick that turns any old TV with HDMI into a smart-TV. So far not much of that is new, but what really dazzled me was a simply feature which I could see making this work even for your great aunt. With the stick plugged into an HDMI behind the TV, launching a Smartphone app automatically launched an app on the dongle. Assuming the TV is set to automatically tune into an HDMI that becomes active this is a potential for a zero setup kit. My Sony TV at home wakes up on some HDMI ports from some devices, so it’s possible, but this is a potential Achilles heel if HDMI hand shaking doesn’t work.

HDMI stick from Japanese startup TVF

I was a bit surprised to see this small Japanese offshoot come all the way from the West coast to rainy France. Nariaki Hatta told me they came via Intertrust, a major sponsor of this year’s event. Oh by the way, the Intertrust CEO gave an enlightening talk that wasn’t about the glory of HbbTV, but explained why Google and Apple born out of the tech start-up world were so bad at the standards game as oppose to TV operators, and so were less likely to be HbbTV supporters. But back to TVF, also surprising was that their whole Linux and Android environment isn’t yet HbbTV, they’re working on it, so their presence really was a mystery.

Anyway the Demo, that turns a smartphone into a remote control to control a VoD portal, was impressive with absolutely no latency when flicking on the smartphone with simultaneous response on the large screen. Live TV services are not supported yet, but Mr Hatta told me this could come in the future.

A commercial launch is pending in Japan with the mobile operator Softbank Mobile.

The next demo that caught me Eye was breathtakingly simple. French TdF

demoed its new “Salto” service, which has just been launched with French public broadcaster France Télévisions. Salto is a pretty cool name for the service, it means somersault in French.

Salto is a near-real-time start-over service available when programs are still airing. It is available from 2 minutes into the program and until the program is finished, when it is made available from within the TV station’s own catch’up service.

The intended Unique Selling Point (USP) is simplicity. Salto is currently available for HbbTV, although it can be ported to any other environment.

The only constraint is that a client app must be deployed on the viewing device.

A small blue button appears whenever you are watching a program for which Salto is available (i.e. when you tune to a live program that started at least 2 minutes ago). Pressing the blue button of your remote let’s you start-over the program, i.e. from the beginning. Pressing the blue button again brings you back to the real-time transmission. That’s it – I don’t see how it could get any simpler.

The app knows what channel is being watched so the TDF backend servers can then serve up a unicast stream on request. An internal TDF CDN is used to stream “open files”. This required some specific engineering as the traditional streaming techniques for VoD work with “closed” files.

The demo that Guy Huquet showed me included an HbbTV enabled TV set and a 2nd screen demo running on an iPad.

IRT is the Institut für Rundfunktechnik, the German research centre for broadcasters and a long-time supporter of HbbTV. Georg Huber for IRT was demoing a red-button demo from German public broadcaster ARD. The features available included:

  • Teletext converted to HbbTV in HD quality,
  • Mediatek, which is a catch’up tv service,
  • An EPG representing the time line of TV channel with present, past & future linking to catch’up and PVR,
  • Special event live streaming during the Olympic games (no longer operational),
  • A selection of HD webcams with panoramas from Germany and Austria.

 

A menu bar on the bottom of the screen is easily sinkable to fit broadcasters graphics charter and logo in true HbbTV spirit.

A shopping demo looked promising until it transpired that it lamely requires a number obtained independently from the shopping website.

A fun TV App Gallery demo involved flashing a QR code to connect second screen to TV set, then scan in a new app with another QR Code (e.g. from my doctor’s waiting room). However much fun this seemed, I did get a feeling this part of the demo was one of those neat solutions desperately looking for a problem to solve.

Lastly, “DOTSCREEN” is a French start-up with 30 people in Boulogne near Paris.

Their CEO Pascal-Hippolyte Besson positioned the company for me explaining that compete with the likes of Accedo Broadband in that they develop apps but say their differentiators are that they also run services and target more screens including the car radio.

They have been an early adopter of HbbTV, also developing apps for France TV.

I saw demos on show of French daily paper “20 minutes” and Météonews available in 20 languages.

On the latter, a 30-minute playlist cleverly looks like barker channel. When you select a geographic area a pre-roll ad is played, which is the business model here. Weather forecasts are available from 10 days to 3 hours. The app is distributed on Philips’ TV as a reference app worldwide and by LG in France although it can be downloaded anywhere. With the advertising DOTSCREEN is clearly playing in the B2C arena. It is however early days and not yet clear what kind of rev-share deals will be available for TV set makers or other stakeholder.

Other developments of note include apps for France 24, TéléStar, Deezer, the PS3 platform and Aljazeera’s stream app for Google TV.

DOTSCREEN’s Olympic games demo, developed for France TV, was still running too.

This demo included moderated news & tweets. French broadcaster TF1 that was listening to the same demo as me noted that the performance of the app was stunning in real-time.

DOTSCREEN finished with an interesting demo for a “pseudo-channel” of home decorating videos pulled off a video store. It showed how to simply breath some fresh life into a collection of videos that could be gathering dust in video storage somewhere. In this case, the app drove the user to interact by making some boring old videos look super sophisticated just with some clever navigation e.g. a playlist of all videos relevant to redecorate a bathroom. Of course there’s a business model here too as the interactivity also lets you buy objects like lights or other fixtures.

The Demo for the daily free paper “20 Minutes” illustrated the fully automated extraction of videos and metadata from the newspaper’s website.

PS: I missed out on the demo of HTTV that was at the show. I'll be posting an update soon.

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Gulf big three Telcos could win big time if only they could cooperate on content

I’ve been spending some time out in the Gulf again on various consulting gigs.

There are currently three pretenders to the crown of biggest regional Telco. Saudi’s STC, Qatar’s Qtel and the Emirates Etislat. STC has a pretty impressive footprint in its own vast country, but the other two make up for a lack of a large local market with capital participations in dozens of other operators, mainly throughout Africa and Asia.

The situation resembles Europe before a combination of regulation and market forces toppled the national incumbents off their pedestals. Most agree any losses the incumbent suffered in those years starting in Thatcher’s 80s but more in the 90s and 00s for the rest of Europe were a small price to pay for the improvements and value consumers saw in triple play services.

But that was before Apple, Google or Netflix loomed so threateningly large on the horizon. Now, with their weakened positions, a common defensive strategy against these behemoths from the USA is to go and cry in front of regulators and governments for some form of protectionism. That might ease the pain, but not cure the problem. The more ambitious ones may seize the opportunity and remember grandpa’s old line that if you can’t beat it, join it. I’m finishing a white paper sponsored by Broadpeak, that explores how and why local operators should embrace OTT providers by selling them their own CDN services, which will always be better than anything from a global provider.

Imposing data caps seems unrealistic in current competitive market conditions, as the operator that initiated them would lose out badly in market share. In France, Free has been fighting Google over YouTube traffic to their subscriber’s detriment for over a year now, the situation is escalating out of control with consumer groups complaining the regulator.

But out here in the gulf the situation is different. Incumbents haven’t yet started their downward spiral and there is an opportunity to do something great.

I believe these three companies have left it too late to succeed alone.

It took Belgacom nearly 10 years to become the content heavyweight it now is in its home market, but nobody had ever heard of Netflix when they first started and Apple was still trying to recruit content into iTunes Music Store.

So where the Belgian incumbent took a decade to get things right, the Gulf Telcos only have one or two years before the global OTT players turn their focus here.

With its subsidiary Intigral, STC has taken a clear lead in terms of content aggregation and probably in video infrastructure too. Opening the capital structure of Intigral to let Etisalat and QTel in may seem counter intuitive at best and probably downright crazy to many. But together the 3 operators could muster enough clout to finally beat some sense into the reactionary content owners.

This triumvirate would need to cooperate on technical CDN issues (but that's a story for another blog), but that still leave a wealth of areas to compete head-on, from user experience to hardware, packaging, pricing, bundling, marketing, business services, etc.

The Middle East is rife with video piracy and Hollywood majors should remember the music labels had all but killed themselves in their wars against file-sharing. They hung on by the skin of their teeth, and some are again a bit hopeful that the likes of Deezer or Spotify might pave the way for the industry’s return to at least part of its former glory. Incumbents like Orange are desperately trying to get into deals with these companies (see Orange - Deezer here).

Hollywood and the TV content rights-holders had been steadfastly maintaining their divide and conquer strategy to content licencing, making any attempt to aggregate content beyond a local play aimed at a specific device impossible.

That attitude has started to crumble, not least because the content owners want to initiate their own OTT strategies without limitation of device or geography.

A stakeholder with enough financial backing could flash a check with enough zeros on it to buy the exclusive rights in the whole region. This could be for a major sporting event or maybe the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

If I go along with this pipe dream, maybe the best of the Rio Olympics in 2016 will only be visible on IP networks in the Gulf, with traditional broadcast left with the crumbs…

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Service Providers and the Smart Home

In the last decade, Pay-TV operators have added telecoms services to their portfolio just as Telcos have added content services to theirs, creating competitive multi-play markets throughout the world. This White Paper explains how the Smart Home can become a new differentiating service for operators to stay competitive. It explains what the Smart Home actually is for the end user and divides the potential markets it can serve into four clear segments. After determining what the drivers will be for this new emerging market it explains in detail what role services providers can play in it.

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The importance of the home gateway in the age of OTT, it will be a key enabler of Big Data.

I wrote this blog entry in planning my visit of the BBWF 2012 show floor.

OTT is creating a deep shift in the TV value chain. Most cord cutters or thinners actually leave their traditional pay TV service to go somewhere else, or trade down to a cheaper subscription. Someone out there is profiting. Even if a 100$ monthly spend becomes 10$, that’s still 10$ of fresh ARPU for the new guy.

But Hulu, Netflix, Roku, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft beware: pay TV operators and even dusty old Telcos have realized that they too can be the new kid on the block when it comes to OTT TV.

But why would I be interested in an old pay TV operator, let alone a Telco, when all the sexy OTT upstarts are vying for my business?

One answer is data, or rather what has recently become known as Big Data. It’s adding fuel to traditional CRM and data mining, but also brings radically new service possibilities.

Like data mining Big Data is basically about aggregating data from user’s interactions with a given service and then number-crunching it in huge data centres to provide marketing teams with customer intelligence. One main goal has always been to improve and better target products to different markets and customer segments.

 

Data mining started as far back as the 1970s and by the 1990s it was an industry in its own right. But it has mainly been one dimensional, querying against a single relational database, or just maybe two or three interlocking databases. The most typical example is of a Supermarket chain analyzing data on the contents of shopping baskets to "mine" combinations of products that are purchased together (there's been a lot of mileage out of the good old beer and diapers case from the 1970s, where a marketeer - who wasn't yet called that - after analyzing shopping basket contents, realized that more beer could be sold if it was positioned in an aisle "on the way" to the diapers at least during weekends).

What’s new though is the explosion in different types of data, i.e. from all the screens in the house, and there’s also a huge increase in the amount of external data that can be collected from a range of sources including social media and messages. At the same time scalable cloud-computing architectures have come along to enable the data crunching to be powerful enough to get closer to real time answers, even when petabytes of data are involved.

So now instead of just realizing why subscribers behaved in a specific way in the past, Big Data will enable operators to optimize a service so it best suits what they will do in the future. For example providing near real-time content or service recommendations based on what the family is doing at the moment …

This is where Big Data will not only serve the interest of incumbent operators by giving them ammunition to fight off some of the OTT upstarts, but also bring new services to the end user. A few decades ago advertising was fun. But today TV advertising has become that period of time you either use technology to make disappear (i.e. with a PVR) or disappear yourself during the break. The truly personalized advertising that Big Data can enable could make it relevant and therefore interesting and oh so much more valuable.

 

You may be wondering what has this got to do with BBWF. Big Data has voracious appetite. This is where a broadband service provider can come in. 3G is often too slow, and is still capped in most markets, while 4G is still only in its infancy, so most content consumed in the home over IP will come through a broadband provider.

This means that a Home gateway is about the only place almost all user interactions go through. The gateway is also the hub of the home network where in-home usages like a child streaming a film dozens upon dozens of times can be captured to help personalize a service (who doesn’t have a few worn out Pixar DVDs that always amaze by still being playable despite all the scratches).

Where almost all operators have fared badly with their ambitious content plans, often closing down channels they created, OTT is giving them a second chance, thanks to the central role of the home gateway. Companies that are exclusively in the Cloud will never get such a complete picture of home usage.  Operators with coherent gateway strategies on the other hand will be best placed to harness Big Data by combining the cloud and the home network most effectively.

 

So at this year’s BBWF I’ll be looking out for companies that will enable my vision of the future. I’ll post something after the event, but I know I’ll look out at least for:

  • ADB that has extensive tools for monitoring home network usage,
  • Axiros that have championed and extend TR-069 to get it to carry more information than in the original spec,
  • Broadpeak who has made me curious with their new nano-CDN technology,
  • Cisco who’s new acquisition NDS have been championing Big Data for a while,
  • SoftAtHome with a compelling hybrid CloudAtHome approach,
  • Witbe and any other QoE companies that are monitoring retail devices.

See you there?