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Carrier Services
Billing & OSS World: BT Overcomes IPTV Challenges
Service Launch in Coming Months Will Test Carrier’s Mettle
by Jim Barthold
Despite daunting technical, commercial and partnership
challenges – and a crowded marketplace where powerful cable
operators Telewest and NTL are merging and possibly adding
Virgin Mobile into their offerings mix and satellite provider
BSkyB controls popular soccer sports programming -- BT is on
target to launch IPTV services to its 8 million U.K. broadband
subscribers in the next several months.
“The work is done and the trials are under way,” said Clive
Selley, CIO of BT Wholesale speaking at Billing & OSS World
in Miami. “The potential prize is very large; the challenge is
to find new ways of packaging content that is attractive.”
BT will probably adopt a pay-per-view model of delivering
content rather than using the bundled programming
subscription method used by most cable companies, Selley
said, noting that high bundle prices turn consumers off.
“The guy who offers top quality service will be valued by the
consumer,” he said.
BT, he added, continues to deal with a series of challenges,
including being able to properly package and deliver high-
quality video over a broadband network that was not initially
built for video entertainment. While BT’s broadband capacity
has increased dramatically over the past four years to the
point where there is more than enough bandwidth to deliver
video service, that may not be enough to ensure a quality
experience so the carrier is adding a “mechanism for
delivering QoS commensurate with a video service to the
home,” he said.
There are also network architecture considerations. Because
video is delivered over a continuous stream rather than in
bursts like broadband voice and data services, it is optimal to
push content out to the network edges and conserve
bandwidth.
Beyond the technical challenges there are more esoteric
concerns about “a whole plethora of standards” and how they
will impact technology since BT, unlike some IPTV providers,
will buy, not build its own technology.
Finally, and probably most crucially, the carrier’s IT staff will
be strained to deal with challenges ranging from
the “capability to take orders in real time” to parental controls
to billing for on-demand services and the MIS force will be
asked to aggregate information that tells the service provider
who’s buying what content, why and who should be targeted,
Selley said.
“All of this dictates our forward policy,” he said.
IPTV will also require BT to establish “forge new relationships
with critical partners” for everything from content to end user
set-top boxes.
Finally, Selley conceded, the company must be prepared for
so-called disruptive technologies that can throw off even the
best planned video service.
“There will be many new disruptive technologies,” he said,
pointing to digital video recorders (DVRs) as one of the more
obvious. “At this stage we can only speculate about what kind
of impact they will have.”
At this point, BT also can only speculate about the size of its
customer base, but Selley said he was confident, based on
the results cable operators NTL and Telewest and satellite
provider BSkyB have been achieving.
“It’s a crowded market,” Selley conceded.
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