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By
Jesse Cryderman
As demand for streaming video, social networking and low-cost telephony have skyrocketed, numerous third-party services have emerged that eat away at the revenue pie which used to be the sole property of CSPs. In the past, if you wanted to make phone calls you paid for an account with the telephone company. If you wanted to watch movies and TV shows on demand, you signed up for cable or satellite service.
Today the game has changed.
Enabled by broadband internet, innovative “Over-The-Top” (OTT) players have exploded on the market, becoming some of the most popular ways for users to connect with services that they once received from CSPs. The reason is simple: why pay for both a cable subscription and high-speed internet if you can use Hulu and NetFlix to view all the TV shows and movies you want? Likewise, why pay for a landline if you can use Skype or GoogleTalk for free?
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Leaders on both sides of the battle agree that there is significant room in the OSS world for monetized solutions. |
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services. But that strategy isn’t
working, says Effi Goldstein, Director of
Marketing and Product Management for
IPGallery. “Service providers are losing
their most profitable service…and it’s
impossible to monetize their customers
when attention is elsewhere.”
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In fact, video services like YouTube are not just popular, they consistently consume the largest portions of internet bandwidth—even in workplace settings; a recent survey by Network Box shows that YouTube consumes 10% of all corporate bandwidth! Mobile data usage is trending similarly, with streaming video being the largest growing sector. A recent study conducted by Juniper Research shows the global mobile app market tripling in the next four years and, according to Gartner, by 2013 mobile platforms will overtake the PC as primary data bandwidth conduits.
Seeking to regain lost revenue, CSPs
have tried to compete one way or
another with OTT players, by throttling
bandwidth, creating tiered pricing
schemes or launching competing
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However, while OTT players and CSPs continue to wage war against each other, smart OSS/BSS solutions have emerged that aim to bridge the gap between providers of data/phone/cable plans and providers of the services that everyone loves. Leaders on both sides of the battle agree that there is significant room in the OSS world for monetized solutions. Roger Lindquist, CEO of Metro PCS, said at the recent 4GWorld Conference in Chicago that “OSS is in focus as much or more than network” when considering the management of data in the pipeline.
Following are two solutions that work to combine the assets of CSPs—a subscriber base and physical data pipe—with the assets of OTT plays—socially relevant and popular service offerings.
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