DD :Billing & OSS World: BT Overcomes IPTV Challenges
Service Launch in Coming Months Will Test Carrier’s Mettle
by Jim Barthold
Thu, May 4. 2006
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.
