Multiplay Services, Bundling and Blending

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

The days of simple triple, quad-play and other types of service bundles are giving way to sophisticated new combinations of services where functionality associated with one device and service can appear in another venue entirely. Caller ID and chat on your TV? Why not? Blending and modifying services can provide both consumers and business users with a slick, futuristic communications experience.

Such a neat bag of tricks requires some sophisticated technology, provided by companies such as Integra5, which is known for ‘blending the bundle’ of services into new communications experiences that span multiple consumer devices for subscribers of cable and IPTV worldwide. Integra5’s i5 Converged Services Platform (i5 CSP) combines real-time voice, video, broadband and mobile data into converged applications – such as MediaFriends™ TV Chat, TV/PC Caller ID, Message Waiting Alerts, Customer Care Alerts, Content Alerts and more – that include personalization, active call control and social media features for delivery across TVs, PCs, and mobile and landline phones. The i5 CSP, found in many IPTV and cable networks, supports advanced IMS, tru2way and EBIF technology architectures.

Integra5’s Steve Borelli, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, says, “Our sweetspot is in delivering next-gen communication experiences across the bundle – TV, PC, Internet and Mobile. That’s our core business. We don’t do movies or games. We do communications across the bundle of services. More specifically, our flagship product was caller ID, and what really took off for us was TV caller ID. We also do PC caller ID and caller ID where, when somebody’s calling your home phone, we actually send an SMS message to your mobile phone so you know who’s calling home. We do all kinds of blended caller ID. But you can see how we use the TV, PC the mobile, the landline phone and we blend it all together. Now we’ve moved well past that.”

“In talking about multiplay and bundling,” says Borelli, “if you go back two or three years ago, many operators were just trying to get their triple or multiplay bundle in place. If they were a cable company, they were adding phone service. If they were a telco, they were adding IPTV. Everybody was just trying to round out their core service offering. But as that started to settle in place, what did it mean to the consumer? Initially, all it meant to the consumer was that you had three services that were from the same operator, but basically they were all siloed services. And you probably got a bottom-of-the-bill discount. That’s where i5 entered the scene. We said, ‘Hey, now that you have a triple play, we can actually start taking different services and making them work across the different devices and really give the consumer bundling, not from a billing perspective, but from an actual end user experience. We’ve been doing this for several years now. TV caller ID and some of our other offerings are very mainstream and we’ve got over 40 customers now in seven countries. That takes us to the present day. Now what? We’re blending and differentiating services, and they’re popular. But where things are going now is that we’re all getting into more sophisticated services. There’s definitely more going on in terms of ties to mobile devices. Mobile is huge. But if you’re a cable operator and a telco, and you don’t own your own mobile network, how can you tie services to that? That’s another area where Integra5 plays a big role.”

“We’re just now rolling out a service we call MediaFriends Chat,” says Borelli. “That’s a service that’s a closed group chat and it takes place on the TV around a sporting event, a program or whatever the group wants to chat about. Here’s how it taps into the multiplay aspect of the system: The consumer uses their computer to set up their buddy list, groups, friends, or whatever. It sends out a messages such as, ‘Do you want to be in Steve Borelli’s New England Patriots Group?’ And people opt in. So it’s a lot like social networking and things that people have formerly done only on the PC. But then let’s say one of the Patriots games is now on TV and I now want to invite those friends to chat with me in real time on my TV while the game is being watched simultaneously. Now, I go to the TV device and pick up the remote control. We use the good old-fashioned universal buttons – A, B and C – that are on everybody’s remote. Nothing fancy, no onscreen keyboards. I hit the universal ‘B’ button and brings up my lists. I can use my regular arrow buttons on the remote to invite my New England Patriots friends to watch the game and chat with me now. I select that and press Send. Now, if my friends are on their TV, they see an invitation appear on the corner of the screen: ‘Steve’s inviting you to go watch the Patriots. Do you want to go or not?’ They can ignore the invitation or they can accept it. If they accept it, it autotunes their TV to the Patriots game, and up comes basically a chat bar that goes underneath the programming. We don’t overlay the programming or interrupt what’s happening, because that program is what’s really fuelling the conversation. But we make it a bit smaller. It takes up about three-quarters of the screen, because now the chat bar is there.”

“In terms of actually doing the chat, you obviously don’t want to use a clumsy onscreen keyboard,” says Borelli. “You don’t want to use a wireless keyboard either. Those things have proven to be not very popular. Instead, people can take their mobile phone and on the screen a little phone number appears. All they have to do is text to the mobile phone and all of their messages and chats will be posted to that group setting on the TV. It’s a closed group, so you know everybody. Your buddies are posting to your MediaFriends Chat, while you’re watching the game, all in real time. It thus leverages your TV and your mobile device for what they do best and really create a true, multiplay, blended experience for the customer that is truly a social entertainment experience.”

So things are definitely becoming more mobile, definitely more social media and social entertainment in nature,” says Borelli. “Those are huge from where we play and obviously in the communications space, that’s really quite hot. Basically, we’re truly enabling the operator to leverage the fact that they provide all of these services and in some cases, such as use of the mobile, these guys don’t even have to be the mobile operator, because we’re enabling text messaging and tying that to an application. So if you’re a cable company and you don’t have a mobile solution yet, you’re still a hero with your customers because you’re enabling applications that tie to the mobile device.”

“Many people talk about video, games and pure entertainment,” says Borelli. “But what we’ve learned in our journey is that the communications category is just as important and valuable to the consumer. The consumer has a high willingness to pay for such communications. These are all services that are uplifting for the total revenue of the operator and their satisfaction ratings. We know that consumers love it and they want more of it.”

“Now look at things from the perspective of the mobile operator, and all they have to offer is that mobile device,” says Borelli. “We also have ways in which we can bridge that mobile operator’s services onto a PC or another device, so the operator can now start to enjoy that multi-device, multi-screen world where, if I happen to be using my PC and that’s my device of choice as a consumer, then I can use it. If I happen to be using my mobile phone and I’m on-the-go, then I can use that. We truly can blend services across various devices so consumers can use them how and when they want.”

Exploring the Idea of Fused Services
Cedar Point Communications became famous with its totally integrated voice and multimedia switch that provides IT departments and network operators with a less expensive, less complex VoIP alternative to distributed softswitching and legacy PBX telephony options.

Rafael Fonseca, Vice President of Applications and Market Development at Cedar Point, says, “We’ve been tracking trends. We not only ask customers what they’re thinking about, but also what their customers are thinking about. There are essentially a couple of forces at work. One has to do with tendencies from the user space which are tightly coupled to the endpoints. Even when we started in 2000 we could see a big push toward offering telephone service by non-traditional providers. They saw IP as a technology that would deliver that service. Cable operators were in the forefront of that push. At that time, the data and voice components were still pretty much separate from each other. Many endpoints now showing up in the marketplace are multimedia/multiservice. As such, they still require the use of the network for transactions and communications. When we started, we saw voice as the beachfront, and then we would eventually move toward a multimedia/multi-play/multiservice environment. We’ve coined the term ‘fused services’ as part of this.”

“Additionally, we’re seeing a new kind of user,” says Fonseca. “They have more economic buying power and they use endpoints in a very proficient way. Early on, people would describe these users as too young to buy anything. But now they’re reaching the marketplace and they use advanced services that the endpoints demand and they can pay for them. Our SAFARI C3 Media Switching System was originally coined a ‘Voice-over-IP’ switch, but it’s really a SIP-based multimedia switch. Our customers have been successful attracting subscribers to voice, video and data services – which are still independent silos – there’s very little if any interaction between them. Our whole intent is to help our customers so they can answer some questions: One, ‘How do I retain subscribers?’ There’s going to be a big push to regaining customers by the incumbents. Two, ‘How can I generate more revenue out of this subscriber base that I have?’ In our view, there are a few services capable of doing this. It involves the ability to change your perception of what voice, video and data services are.”

“Today, for example, your video service is basically a standalone service,” says Fonseca. “It doesn’t really interact with anything else. Same with your data and voice services. Our whole idea is to create a fusion of these services in such a way so that you can have features that interact with different appliances that were traditionally associated with one of these services. For example, a simple one that people have talked about for a long time because it has a lot of power, is caller on TV. You’re taking a feature that was traditionally known as a telephony feature, such as caller ID, and now you’re spanning it toward an appliance that normally was associated with video or TV service. So now you have this interesting fusion of a call feature that’s interacting with two appliances that normally reside in different service silos. Now, however, they are part of a given service. What that does is to give you a good base for changing the mindset of what voice services are in the eyes of the person paying for that service. It also changes what that appliance, called the TV set, can do for you.”

“In the longer term, you can use your TV set or PC as a call control vehicle that allows you to terminate a call, or indicate that you don’t want to be disturbed right now, and send calls directly to voicemail,” says Fonseca. “You’ll be able to do that with your TV remote control at some point. Or, if you’re surfing on a PC, you can do the same thing. That’s part of the idea of fusing these services in such a way that now these services don’t appear similar to what the competition could be offering. Then, when you start adding mobile endpoints in a quad-play, now you’re creating a base for the ability to redirect this service or combination of services to different endpoints, depending on who you are, where you are and the network on which you’re registered. That in a nutshell are the trends we see and the dynamics at play here.” “What we’re doing at Cedar Point with SAFARI is that we recognize that, in reality, transactions are transactions between endpoints,” says Fonseca. “It’s about how these endpoints interact with the network and with the application layer in our customer networks, and how the media gets transported to those different endpoints. We recognize that Cedar Point has a wealth of assets in SAFARI that could be leveraged to the multimedia components. We can take a session and make it richer by fusing different services that include voice, data or voice, video and data.”

Working the Network Edge
U4EA Technologies provides multi-service business gateways that enable service providers to deploy highly integrated and easily manageable IP communications solutions to SMB and enterprise customers. U4EA’s all-in-one customer premises devices are supported by the company’s QoS (GoS) mechanisms that ensure the secure, reliable and cost-effective delivery of converged VoIP, data and video services. The U4EA Fusion Series includes advanced network signaling gateways that carriers use to interconnect legacy networks and equipment with next-gen networks. Also, U4EA Wireless delivers solutions for SMB mobility applications.

U4EA’s Jim Greenway, Vice President of Marketing, says, “Our positioning is squarely toward unified communications. Now, UC has turned into a large category, and the definition can be overwhelming sometimes. We view it as the ongoing convergence of voice, data, video and any real-time or semi-real-time media streams. As a company, we’ve been around for almost 10 years, founded on some unique QoS technology. It’s the only multidimensional QoS in the market that’s equipped to deal with unified communications. We can deal with multiple real-time or near real-time applications, be it voice, video, cloud computing, presence, OCS, and things that require a single pipe from an SMB, say, but also requires you to carefully manage that bandwidth so that all of the applications will indeed work in the network. We have a whole series of MSBGs, or Multi-Service Business Gateways. MSBGs are an edge or a boundary device. They can incorporate session border control, but we actually sit at the network edge on the customer premise. I’d say the MSBG is an evolution of the IAD [Integrated Access Device]. We combine routing, switching, voice gateways, security features such as firewalls and stateful packet inspection. We combine four or five key devices that an SMB or an enterprise branch would have to go out and buy and try and cobble together. We can put all of that functionality into a single device. Fundamental to that is our QoS software that helps control multiple streams.”

“For example, in our suite we target SMBs and enterprise branch offices that want to deploy more than just voice or data or keep them totally separate,” says Greenway. “When a service provider says, ‘I’m going to roll out UC to an SMB’ and they’re going to have voice, data, video and wireless mobility on premise, they need a single converged edge device. And that’s what we produce, the MSBG.”

It's a Whole New World of Multiplay
As time goes on, our long-time association of certain functions with certain devices will begin to blur as multiplay services and blending technologies begin to affect networks everywhere. Along with great flexibility in communications and entertainment will come new services and ways for old devices to do new tricks.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

Companies mentioned in this article:

Cedar Point Communications
www.cedarpointcom.com

Integra5 (News - Alert)
www.integra5.com

U4EA Technologies
www.u4eatech.com

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