Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 7

	This Month's Issue:
	On The Horizon

Over-The-Top Services

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them under. Then the government would be forced into either a bail out or a take over of the networks. (Remember what happened to passenger railroads.)

“There is also a lack of incentive for access providers to invest in capacity on behalf of Google to deliver richer, heavier content (where Google collects the revenues).” [Simon Torrance, Telco 2.0] Google understands this and is determined to control its own destiny. Google’s answer may be to build network itself.

Ironically, the use of P2P services to illegally copy and distribute copyrighted material may give the ammunition for network operators to throttle P2P traffic in general. The self-same users, who have come to depend on P2P mesh network delivered services, may be shooting themselves in the foot. On the other hand, lawful content distribution has become so complex to understand that building justifiable business policies that are defendable to irate customers is not currently possible.

Compromise may be found in the business model of differential charging to guarantee "Quality of Service." Unfortunately, this can lead to poor service if QoS is set below that needed for specific protocols and information streams; this is called throttling traffic. However, it is not very clear who pays the network owner for the QoS: sender, receiver, producer, user, network handing off the traffic, network receiving the traffic? As the government is pulled into this debate, will the government begin to regulate throttling or QoS such that it becomes the new tariffed service? The business model is still quite undetermined.

Telco 2.0

Telco 2.0 is a trademarked web portal of Simon Torrance. Simon has worked with operators and other clients to evolve a proposed business model that reacts to most of these issues driven by the advent of OTT services. This Telco 2.0 business model also assumes that a strong convergence will occur between the Media Content companies and the Telco ecosystem. In this vision, the service provider becomes a “logistics solution provider” with a dual-sided business model. The SP receives payment from the content creators to ensure delivery of their specific service with appropriate QoS. It is also getting paid by the end customer for access and delivery of bits. It probably bills for the delivery of content and then aggregates the payments for the content rights distributor, skimming a transaction fee. And finally, SPs sell business intelligence information on customer use patterns back to the content creators and their competitors.

This optimistic model relies on an extended

Vint Cerf has stated, "The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. A lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive."

Ecosystem of partners. Specifically the Media, telecom service providers, consumer electronic telecom end-user-device manufactures, and platform vendors are essential members all collaborating in a bi-directional supply chain. The end user is an asset whose access is controlled by the service provider, which is the glue holding this construct together. This is a workable, but perhaps idealistic, business model. The TeleManagement Forum leadership and its Service Provider council apparently back this approach - This is what fueled the expansion of the TM Forum to include Media companies. But where are the OTT service developers and platforms in this model? We do not see them. Indeed, Telco 2.0 while plausible also does not seem to have a clear story of OSS/BSS involvement beyond revenue aggregation and billing for transaction services.

The recent TM Forum “Content Encounter” embraced Telco 2.0 in a super-Catalyst demonstration. It also included DRM and “media content envelopes” as a telco ecosystem service product, aimed at exciting media and content companies with control of, and usage revenue for, their intellectual property. It also demonstrated an operator providing everyone who pays for it with customer use information allowing classification of users and directed market action targeting these same end users. This seems the ideal “get paid at both ends” solution. However, the typical customer using OTT services hates DRM. So will they hate these enveloped media services and not buy these services? Is the service provider opting into the same “bad guy” image of the digital rights distribution companies? Or will the users just break DRM again, wasting everyone’s development efforts?

Will users even need the envelope content information maintained in these media protocols? On the surface, this is great stuff. However, today it is easy enough to find music information via a web-service data lookup to known music library sites. Likely this kind of information service will only proliferate; the services themselves paid for via alternate revenue routes such as selling customer media use patterns back to media creators.

And this Telco 2.0 media logistics chain, and the missing OTT services, affects Cabelco’s and Telco’s in different ways. Cable delivery

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