Livewire

The problems of justifying the ROI for an IPTV deployment have been widely documented by many analysts and media outlets. Most generally, cost concerns about the associated network infrastructure, software platform uplift, customer premise equipment and content acquisition for an IPTV deployment seem to be the biggest issues. However, Telcos must provide IPTV services as a defensive hedge against triple play offerings of voice, broadband and video from competitors such as cable companies. This issue can be addressed by revenue streams beyond monthly subscriptions which include interactive services and advertising. The breadth of interactive services and deployment into a lean forward/back environment with TV remote navigation is a subject upon itself, so I will focus on the potential and complexity of providing advertising to the IPTV platform.

The good news is that cable local advertising sales and insertion in North America is a fairly evolved model for which to copy. European based operators have additional regulatory considerations which creates some adjustment. Based on cable local ad sales in the US, the addressable market is approximately $19B* with Comcast taking a lead, partially due to their highly regarded AdTag and AdCopy platforms (this may change with the new Canoe Ventures pan-cable advertising proposition). IPTV offerings from Telcos could potentially expand the market by providing new interactive capabilities such telescoping (clicking through the ad to a landing page), better targeting and measurement which increases the ad avail value, and providing more channel sponsorship possibilities since IPTV does not have the current channel limitation concerns of cable.

While the total potential for local advertising sales may change due to factors such as economic conditions and DVR (ad skipping) technology, the there is still significant opportunity to increase average revenue per user with advertising. This is why at Infosys; we are focusing on new developments such as micro-targeting, customer value analysis and segmentation in addition to proactively building out advertising value chain solutions to help our customer take advantage of this opportunity. What are your thoughts on the advertising potential for IPTV providers?

 (*2007 estimate from SNL Kagan)

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought it was just me, but I was thinking that there seemed to have been an unusual number of announcements lately regarding Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Luckily, Dan Rayburn of Frost & Sullivan (who has a good blog by the way http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/) confirmed those suspicions recently in some of his postings and reports. His number for new CDN investment over the last 18 months is near $400M, this is in addition to whatever investment has been made in current CDN providers’ infrastructure (e.g. big players like Akamai or Limelight Networks or telecoms like Level 3 or BT). If this seems eerily similar to the heady dot com days circa 2000, I feel you have guessed correctly. That last meltdown resulted in a fire sale of cheap fiber to beneficiaries such as Google and others who astutely picked up those assets. How will it turn out this time?

To answer that question we need to look at what is driving demand in this latest round. The need to distribute even more content to greater reaches of the network for sharing for sites like YouTube or social networking is part of the equation. The other side being for enterprises requiring data management or content owners (e.g. Viacom, Disney) needing reliable distribution. However, this just begs the question of at what point do we have enough bandwidth? You could look at Microsoft’s decision to spend $2B to further develop its own data center and network infrastructure to create competitive advantage and provide managed services to large enterprises as a proxy answer being “obviously not enough”. Well, closer inspection reveals that the new managed services or other value add on top of those large pipes is the real opportunity beyond bandwidth, basic management and reporting. For this reason, I really like what CDN providers such as BT have done with their BT Mosaic service which allows their customers to manage and distribute the content transported over BT’s network. It is those types of services which will create competitive advantage in the CDN marketplace. As for competitors that are simply “pipes” providers? I believe the next round of consolidation is on the way for those players in a commodity business. The revenues do not support “infrastructure only” models particularly when the experts of the network, the telecom providers, are quickly ramping up operations. What are your thoughts?

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ability to directly target hundreds of millions or even billions of pre-qualified potential customers with specific messaging is an advertiser’s dream. With the mobile phone being a highly individualized device that is typically not shared, this promise should be a quick reality by simply mining some existing data owned by the mobile operator. Eric Schmitt, the CEO of Google, has even recently said in an interview with CNBC that “over time we will make more money from mobile advertising” than with online ad serving.  If we take the scenario further, the promise of location based technologies will create additional value by quickly serving up contextual advertising just in time as you pass by the shop that is trying to lure you inside. Analysts have put the value of serving those ad avails for the mobile advertising market in the range of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars. At a time when mobile operators are struggling to maintain margins, is seems that they are sitting on a goldmine, right? Well, not so much.

There are a number of factors to consider, the first being the assumption that good and accessible customer data exists for each mobile device. As you move out of the western and in particular the US market, the number of prepaid customer dramatically increases which means that reliable customer data to which to match to a psychographic [definition] profile for ad targeting may not exist. Additionally, if the data does exist, it is often stored in a myriad of different customer systems owned by the mobile operator which makes a common extraction scheme more difficult. Second, due to a diversity of mobile handset operating systems and device characteristics, the rendering of the ad to ensure a common look or branding experience is challenging. Mobile rendering technologies exist, but you will still have issues between viewing an ad on a smartphone with a large screen and a mass market feature phone. Nokia has taken some steps in the right direction to address these issues with their Nokia Advertising Alliance, but again you are limited to phones served by the Nokia Media Network. This complexity is also another reason Google is launching their Android platform. Third, it is highly unlikely that mobile operators will share customer data so the launch of any pan-operator ad campaign would be limited by the customer base of a single mobile operator and need to be repeated with other mobile operators in that region. Fourth, the assumption that people are breathlessly awaiting advertising as they move around town is a bit off base. Granted, opt-in profiles can be exploited; however, we have not seen a good model in which to do so. Partially for this reason, location based services have been long on promise and short on delivery for quite some time. We also have already seen the legal issues internet service providers have faced with the NebuAd deployments where users were served advertisements based on web surfing behavior without any opt-in, so having approval of the targeted customer is vital. I feel the best opportunity here would be location linked to mobile search e.g. show we restaurants in my vicinity when I search for restaurants. Last (certainly not the final complexity to this problem), would be the maturing of the mobile operator’s role in the advertising value chain. They are just starting to develop models to exploit this opportunity and will need to become more efficient in operation for ad agencies to appropriately be able to execute advertising campaigns.

So where does that leave us? We have issues with data access for appropriate ad targeting, ad rendering across mobile devices is complex, ad serving across multiple operator’s customer bases implies replicated effort, location based targeting may not be an advertising boon and the mobile operators are still developing their own models to even efficiently operate in the advertising value chain. My colleague Bryon Morrison, the president of Ipsh! whose company executes mobile campaigns on behalf of big brands, equates some of these growing pains to the early days of the internet where the promise existed, but it took a while for monetization mature. If we start there, ad serving on the mobile internet has good short term potential since it bypasses the issues of data access and device rendering, but provides relatively small screen space and weak usage penetration. Serving ad campaigns via SMS is currently the simplest and most effective manner due to ease of management across operators and devices in addition to relatively good click thru success. The most significant new wild card in some regions has been the use of image recognition via the integrated camera on the phone which has met with significant success by again creating significant click thru and taking the complexity out of rendering mobile websites via url input by automatically navigating the user to the ad landing page once the image is captured.

To sum it all up, I am not yet completely sold on the current ad market projections since I feel too many obstacles still exist. However, I do value mobile as an advertising channel and am encouraged by the efforts of those like Bryon at Ipsh! who continue to exploit this evolving market. Additionally, I am very bullish on image recognition as a game changing technology to completely change the way we interact with print or display advertising. What are your thoughts?

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that we are constantly hearing about the promise of mobile data, applications or mobile internet. In fairness, there have been a number of factors conspiring against progress including handset capability, competing standards, user interface issues and even complexity in billing plans. However, there have been a few positive steps that will hopefully continue to push the market in the right direction.

First off, the announcement of Symbian going open source along with an alliance with Android to create a common open source platform should help coalesce the developer community in addition to removing operating system (OS) variety. Kudos to Nokia’s and Google’s foresight in regards to this issue. At the last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I heard the then CEO of Vodafone, Arun Sarin, call for mobile OS consolidation in the marketplace during his keynote. A fragmented marketplace does not benefit content owners who must incur increased development and testing expense to support the various OS configurations, which in turn does not benefit the mobile operator. To illustrate the point, I had a conversation with the European Mobile Head of a leading games publisher who mentioned that for each game title, his team supports a matrixed spreadsheet by phone type and by mobile operator to track development build or test certification. This consolidation will help all content owners or application developers spend more time making compelling experiences for the end customer.  

The second big achievement for mobile is the rise of the handset which is interestingly being led by Apple. While this is in contradiction to open OS, the iPhone clearly demonstrates the value of device driven experiences to encourage consumption. It has been well documented that 95% iPhone users regularly surf the mobile internet which is multiple times higher penetration than other phone models. Additionally, the Apple App store has recorded 60 million users downloading applications in the first month of being launched. The point is not to further applaud Apple, but to highlight that mobile devices can be game changers and that the “iPhone killers” are already being launched by the competition which will bring a new wave of innovation into the market place. This will only help drive usage of mobile internet services.

The last trend has been the mobile operators providing more attractive mobile data plans to remove the complexity from the end user. Most consumers struggle to understand the number of bytes required for a download which leads to confusion or a surprise when the bills come due. In the US at least, the major operators have all announced new plan options from Sprint’s “Simply Everything” to similar options from ATT or Verizon that promote mobile data usage by enabling experimentation, and hopefully adoption as well, by the end user who would not be constrained by download limits.

Results announced by Chetan Sharma Consulting for the wireless mobile data market have been very positive. In the last quarter, data related average revenue per user grew $.50 to help offset declining voice revenues. That put Verizon and ATT at $2.6B and $2.5B in data services revenues respectively. The interesting caveat to those numbers is that non-messaging revenues accounted for 50-60% of those totals which implies a strong uptake of mobile content or internet services. Actions by the operators, platform providers and handset manufacturers seems to be finally in alignment which should only benefit the end customers and allow mobile services to reach its market potential. What are your thoughts?

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Particularly in the IPTV space, many articles can be found regarding “content as king” with the implication that compelling content will drive viewership, assuming all other things equal such as quality of service, etc. A recent report from Analysys Mason regarding multi-play services (this was the Triple Play of phone, broadband and video/IPTV with mobile not included in the particular analysis) in the Western European market found a “lack of compelling TV content from telcos” and “difficulties in transferring telco brand attributes to the TV content market” as barriers to Telco TV penetration. I definitely agree with the assessment as Telecoms cannot have an inferior offering to current cable incumbents. The issue becomes, at what point does content remain a differentiator and at what price is that content still worth purchasing? There have been numerous US-based IPTV providers announcing expansions of VOD libraries or increased HD offerings just as European IPTV providers have announced rights to sports such as soccer. At some point, these triple play offerings start to look very similar to the end customer which essentially makes a premium offering of video commoditized. We have already seen downward price pressures on the bundles in certain US markets were competition exists with a cable incumbent and Telecom IPTV entrant. This further skews an already difficult business case for IPTV while hampering the ability to pay additional content premiums.

In my opinion, content is part of the “table stakes” offering. Creating compelling experiences that span multiple channels such as broadband, video and mobile will be a true differentiator. This is one of the reasons that we at Infosys have been investing in research projects for personal virtual libraries, products to easily port web content to video or mobile and enabling secure handoffs between network access modes. This involves getting closer to the connected home to enable easy transfer of content between those consumption mediums so current silos of content become transparent to the customer. It is taking the taking the talk of “anytime, anywhere” content and making it a simple reality or compelling experience for the end customer. One very good and simple example is the deployment of multi-room Digital Video Recorders. This is not cross-channel, but it is cross-location in the house and does not tie the user to a particular TV.  It is a great experience for the customer. The winners in the Triple Play race will build more experiences like this to differentiate their offering while using content to establish market parity.

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished reading a whitepaper regarding a digital media divide which was base around a struggle between content owners (e.g. HBO) and user generated content (UGC). The premise was the disruption created by UGC as being a threat to the content owners, essentially a competition for consumer timeshare and wallet. While I agree that there is a limit to the amount of content that can be consumed, I don’t see the divide of content owners vs UGC as the larger issue since I feel that consumers will always value good, original content. I believe the bigger issue is sharing and downward pressure on the price of mobile or web content. For example in the U.S., the price of a song is no more than Apple’s iTunes marketplace of $.99 due to their wide consumer base. Other services are moving closer to “all you can eat” with a subscription, such as Nokia’s Comes with Music, which is even less expensive. The price of digital content is further depressed via file sharing or sites that do not enforce copywrite. However, content owners can fight back and enable communities to form around their content which incorporates UGC to increase viewer loyalty and the value of their content. Potentially, concert and merchandise interest is increased for a musical artist or advertising premiums and ratings are increased for the broadcast or web/mobile viewing of a show such as Lost or Sopranos. In these instances, UGC can be harnessed to become an enabler, not a threat. It is a matter of changing business models to find all available revenue streams when the primary revenue stream is under pricing pressure.

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There have been many announcements over the last year with Communications Service Providers providing access to popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and others. In the short run, this provides potential subscription revenue and data plan uplift to drive average revenue per user. However, I still have many concerns with this approach in that it does not create differentiation or enable one of the Service Provider’s key assets, customer information, since the social networking sites are essentially closed “black box” solutions. Orange has just announced a service to consolidate social networking sites to enable the display of “popular functions of each site side by side so they can be accessed with one click… to send messages, upload photos and check status updates without having to browse individual URLs or log into separate sites” which I feel is a terrific step forward. This not only creates differentiation, but also a new customer experience to ease the issues with managing multiple social networking sites and puts the Orange brand in the front of that access portal. Essentially, this is having the original network provider manage these new networks in an efficient manner.

While the efforts mentioned above are interesting, I feel they still fall short due to the fact that the value of the social network, the information on member interactions or social graph, is still hidden from the Service Provider. The information is not combined with the vast amount of customer information already resident within the Service Provider’s own databases. Gaining access to that social graph would provide insights to key influencers and support rich campaign targeting, particularly when combined with data from the mobile web or IPTV platforms. This is one of the reasons Infosys has created a white-label offering for Service Providers to launch their own social networking platforms that would be integrated into their own customer information systems and assets, in addition to providing lifestyle themes such as sports, to provide purpose to those community interactions. It is my opinion that this model will create the most value to the service provider due to the rich customer information generated, the creation of new commerce and advertising opportunities, and the establishment of a hub to promote other value added services. What are your thoughts on this approach? I welcome the discussion.

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading " The Evolution of Web Apps & Human Interaction" »

Posted by Ilya Joel Pitcher at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought I would pen  a blog is based on a little spiel I give when people ask me what the @#*$ is Web 2.0?  The focus is not on technologies and features but more on the nature of the dynamic between the human and the computer...and these days I should probably chuck in the ubiquitous "cloud".

To illustrate some of the concepts, I will be using mapping/location applications as an example.  Ever since one of our ancestors stood up straight and started looking down to a 2-d surface, maps have been a concept we all "get" and have tended to be suitable for early adopters..be they Norse Vikings, Chinese Astronomers or Generation Y looking for the nearest pizza.

The first widely adopted incarnation of the "World Wide Web" - remember when you had to use the full name? - was premised on the ability to render content to a screen and use hyperlinks to navigate between different sets of content.   The key aspect of this was that human's had to choose associations between data and navigate a path based on their interpretation.   And it was people who had to draw the connections between two sets of content to come up with useful information.

To apply this to the mapping context, a person used to do something like the following;

Go to a directory listing site;
Choose the link for the category they were looking for;
If they were lucky, search for a name  or, often the case back then, scroll through big long lists;
Select a listing, write down address.
Go to different site where images of maps were kept;
Search, or look up index, for street name to find out which map page it was on;
Select map page;
Use the map coordinates to find the street on the image and then work and, if they were lucky, roughly where the number would be; and
If you wanted directions, link through several pages of map images trying to trace back to your place.
Wow - did we really do all that once?

The key aspects of this are that humans provided the ability to correlate information, resolve location information and persist results.  Computers and the internet merely served to store and serve content and links to content.

Some people reading this will never even have experienced that process, for them Web 2.0 style interaction is all they have known.  But what is different about Web 2.0 from this perspective of human, computer and network interaction.    I'm not going to talk about AJAX, JSON and a myriad of other technology labels - see here if you want that - or even about definitions of Web 2.0 - everyone seems to have agreed O'Reilly nailed that one. 

Continue reading "Evolution of Human Interaction on the Web" »

Posted by Ilya Joel Pitcher at 02:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Infosys recognises that three of the most self-evident social trends are;

1.       Increased availability and adoption of high-speed broadband across tethered and un-tethered access technologies;
2.       Increased access to and adoption of technology to empower individual users to create, manage and distribute digital content; and
3.       Increasing sophistication and heightened expectations in relation to the Internet experience.

Posted by Ilya Joel Pitcher at 02:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was at the NXTComm conference (the US telco show) in Chicago last week - and the air of bullishness in the industry was inescapable. Starting with AT&T's Randall Stephenson's optimism-filled keynote driving mobility, to Verizon's celebration of customer delight, it appears the telcos are making all the right moves. Any cable operator executive at the show would have clearly felt intimidated with the strides that telcos seem to be making into video world. IPTV was everywhere on the exhibit floor - service providers, end-user device makers, enabling platforms, middleware and turnkey solution providers.

If anything struck me as odd, it was the rather weak voice that content providers had at the show. I would have thought that the telcos would be seriously courting the studios with some public displays of affection - but instead, I saw them touting more person-to-person communications (e.g. AT&T's videoshare) and personal convenience capabilities (e.g. Microsoft's 3-screen Telco 2.0 concept). In a world of converging quadruple-play, I guess differentiation beyond channel line-ups is important to highlight.

Another interesting observation at the IPTV displays was the way everyone was marketing their product using the ensemble. As a lay consumer, and based purely on what I saw at the show, I would have equated Motorola, Microsoft and AT&T as independent providers of an integrated experience ... though each came from a different perspective of how they understand me as an end-customer. The extent of collaboration required to deliver an out-of-the-world customer experience is amazing - perhaps why Cisco's John Chambers picked collaboration as the topic of his keynote. But, making collaborative structures work within the organization is one thing, making them work across organizations poses a new and interesting challenge for the largely monolithic aggregators. The iPhone release due this week will be a true stress test of such a partnership.

And I wont be surprised to see Google and Apple making a splash of their own at next years telco conference.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Knowledge management has for long been on the business and IT agenda of most CSPs. Yet, in the pursuit of  converged customer service operations, the evidence point to the emerging area of knowledge integration which can significantly enhance an organization's ability to accomplish operational transformation.

In the current environment, customer service information resides in multiple product silos, groups and organizations making it difficult if not impossible to understand and manage the customer experience. The integration of this information relies on a combination of highly knowledgeable specialist individuals and loose SLAs between various customer service groups.

While this approach has been sufficient in the past, the increasing rapidity of new product and service launches, and the demands of converged operations are outpacing this person-dependent knowledge integration. A new kind of knowledge model which acts as the customer service blueprint for each new (or existing) service is required. This new knowledge integration model will integrate disparate operational silos of information and create an organizing force that can form the basis for converged operations.

Knowledge management was about archiving the best practices of the past.

Knowledge integration is about architecting the operations of the future.

Continue reading "The Customer Knowledge Integration Initiative" »

Posted by Deepak Swamy at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Customer experience leadership is the next battlefield for communications service providers (CSP) considering converged services. To be successful, organizations must integrate knowledge scattered among disparate functional and operational units and deliver best-in-class customer support for converged IP-based services. CSPs must also introduce proactive and predictive capabilities for customer experience differentiation.

Continue reading "Customer Experience Leadership through transformed Customer Service Operations" »

Posted by Deepak Swamy at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Deepak Swamy is Associate Vice President at Infosys Technologies, and is responsible for strategic leadership of Infosys’ business solutions for communication services providers. He is an acknowledged industry expert on the converging communications market, leads strategic consulting engagements, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences on “quadruple-play” and IMS strategies for cable MSOs and wireline and wireless CSPs.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was reading an interview with Keith Pardy, SVP for Nokia's strategic marketing, published in a recent issue of the Mc.Kinsey Quarterly. Commenting on the fast paced nature of the mobile handset market, Mr.Pardy talks about how Nokia researches consumer behavior and segments their consumer base into 12 groups - each with its unique characteristic of what they would expect from a Nokia phone. He goes on to say that at any time, Nokia deals with releasing 50 products a year worldwide, each with a lifespan of 12-24 months.

The complexity of managing such a dynamic product line in the high-tech industry can be mindboggling...the backward and forward integration with supply-chains, the preciseness and simplification of marketing campaigns and the keen balancing of development and sustenance efforts.

Imagine my surprise then, when I read this article announcing Comcast's intention to begin selling cordless phone sets with enhanced features. The cable industry has been aggressive in their market statements of late - taking on the ILECs and their plans to enter the entertainment world (See this article from the 2007 Cable Show).

CableCos and telcos are faced with this new challenge: business models that were built around the notion of long-cycle product deployments are now obsolete. If consumer preferences change at lightning pace, will they be able to achieve time-to-market for their service innovations, like Nokia does with its product engineering? A recent survey of telco executives by Amdocs emphasizes the importance of good OSS to achieve time-to-market, but I think it goes beyond that. While automation is key,  nimbleness also requires seamless and quick information exchange across departments and partners. It requires intimate understanding of consumers - built through relationships rather than products.

Given their closeness, service providers can learn a lot from device suppliers about managing rapid product deployment.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If a travelling mobile-user temporarily connects to another provider's service because his own provider did not offer adequate roaming, does it count as churn ? If a customer that bought a phone+DSL bundle uses a Skype-type service to make all his long distance calls, should he be included in market share ?

Consumers have become less predictable, and people's lives have taken on the parallelism and self-directing knowledge of an IP packet navigating the network. The needs of INDIVIDUAL customers are changing faster than any older notion of a generic customer market.

For communications service providers, the best approach to enhancing their capacity to anticipate change is to become the change agent itself. Market segmentation has shifted from organizaing-around-what-you-offer to organizing-around-what-people-want. It is easy to forget that even in the age of wire-line voice, the real reason someone used the phone was not primarily because the network was available, but because they loved to hear the voice of the person at the other end of the line.

Customer Integration is the new theme - and not just left to the customer service department. Loyalty programs are evolving into product co-creation for the intimacy it provides in customer relationships. Market share is passe. Wallet share is paramount. How much of each customer's needs you service is becoming more important than how many customers you service.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I attended a conference recently, that brought together broadcast studios, content providers, advertising companies, cable companies and new age video distributors (ie. telecom service providers.) It made for some very interesting conversation:

It appears to me that the media & content industry is showing the first signs of a collapsing chain. Take for instance what the iTunes store is doing to music - by putting the act of compiling CDs into the hands of end consumers. For a recording artist, this has greatly increased the risk of revenue loss on albums - for now, every single needs to be a hit song. Of course, there is a contrary viewpoint to this - that something like iTunes also vastly increases the "long tail" for niche segment songs etc. Similarly, mySpace and youTube are eliminating the "middle-parties" by collapsing the video content publishing chain. With the rise of TiVo and DVRs, advertisers are embedding their products into the actual content of TV shows. Sporting franchises are embracing the term "triple-play" in a whole new context.

Is the once linear chain of customer value delivery fast becoming a rush of players tripping over each other in an effort to directly interact with the end customer? Look at what's happening - "Intel Inside" is on the outside. Motorola markets its RAZR features directly to the end consumer so they demand it from their service providers. The Sony Store sells WLAN from Cingular.

Everyone is marketing his product using the ensemble. And any single entity's unilateral control over its marketplace has weakened considerably.

Consumers' inboxes are flooded - urging them to think out of the box.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Changes in services and demographics have significantly redefined the communications industry’s economic pie, and the players that contend for a slice of it. Traditional telcos, Cable TV providers, Internet portals and mobile service providers are obvious contenders. But already, city municipalities, power utilities and Hollywood studios are providing alternate access ramps to the unified communications-entertainment highway.  

Everyone’s vying for that sweet spot in the living room, bringing their own consumer interests to the party.

The Flat World forces have caused huge entry, sustenance and growth barriers in this industry to drop, leading to a plethora of competitive elements and consumer alternatives for "staying connected".

Internet Protocol (IP) technologies are flattening the core of the industry’s model. The new technology platforms are really leveling the playing field for deploying cheaper innovation faster, and by smaller players.

At the same time, consumer awareness is flattening the consumption edges of the industry. For instance, haven't you, the consumer, become more aware of what's behind the firewalls? More demanding of the converged services you desire? Don't you crave a service provider that can change as fast as you?

I think these trends have fueled the accelerated deployment of new innovation and the convergence of hitherto distinct businesses - communications, broadband, broadcast, entertainment and technology.

And all of this did not happen overnight! Rather, over the last decade or so, they have happened in iterations as the industry went through a roller coaster. Just when the telcos replaced dial-up with faster ADSL, cable companies entered the voice and internet access markets. Even as telcos close nationwide content deals for their new video services, the nature of broadcast television is shifting to more personal and community content on TiVos and youTube. The turns are getting faster, steeper and closer to each other, causing even more disruption to known orders.

It's forcing the incumbents to behave like challengers.

Continue reading "The Incumbent Challenge" »

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“What?” I hear you say, “Another blog for the communications industry? “ Well, like most others, we hope to make a point here and then take it this way and that to create a few lines, and then maybe go around in circles before we finally erase the board and start again with renewed vigor…

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)