Content Management Can’t Work Without Collaboration: An Excerpt from a Recent TM Forum Insights Report

With revenue growth in traditional services lagging, content management is at the heart of any service provider and media/entertainment company revenue growth strategy, and any telecom operator that is in the midst of a technology transformation should have a robust content delivery and management strategy as part of the underlying planning.

Successful content delivery requires a multi-step ordering, delivery and revenue management strategy that integrates the carrier OSS/BSS with the content provider's and offers a quality of service and service assurance mechanism that minimizes delivery and customer care issues. While all the technology pieces must be in place in order to build a delivery strategy, business rules, standards and processes are equally important to assure the success of content delivery and its subsequent monetization. 

Shifting Business Models
The impact of digital content is already having a profound effect on traditional delivery channels, creating both confusion and opportunity as traditional distribution points are closing their doors and forcing operators and content enablers to start getting creative.  

As business models for music and video delivery shift, one would expect both the communications service provider and media/entertainment industries to move rapidly to support this new model. The technological impact of the shift to supporting a flexible content management delivery has hit numerous roadblocks due to previous business model attempts and failures, general inertia, longstanding legal guidelines that have been in place for physical content distribution, lack of OSS/BSS capabilities to support the order-to-cash-to-care process, and illegal distribution that creates a free method for receiving high-value content.

Yet recent panel discussions at TM Forum’s Management World Orlando highlighted one key area whose importance is above and beyond that of just technology. That area is of course, collaboration. Based on feedback from panels from both the CSP side and the media/entertainment side of the business, very little has been done up until this point to create a more unified vision for how content management should be supported.

Communications service providers and media/entertainment companies should be focusing on the creation of a collaborative content management strategy that links content creators, aggregators, value added players, carriers and consumers together seamlessly. This model will allow the end customer to gain access to content from any source at any time, and allow all network facing players to play both active and passive roles in the delivery. The active or passive nature of the players will vary based on the interworkings of the content delivery chain, the value of each player’s role in the delivery, and in many cases, the end customer’s entry point into the content value chain.

Content providers who deliver content directly to the customer will disintermediate the communications service provider and relegate them to the “pipe” provider. Service providers who wish to play a value-added role in content delivery must think about injecting value in the content delivery value chain and act either as an intermediary or as a value added partner to the content originator by offering cross promotions, cross advertising, or unique telco/content bundles.

Teaming Up During Tough Economic Times
Looking at the current state of back office investment across the media and entertainment space, it is evident that a standardized content management structure for CSPs and media providers cannot be found anywhere in the industry. Lack of spending on digital content (estimated as less than 10 percent of all carrier revenue to date) and past digital distribution model failures have made it difficult for these players to invest in a potentially risky service delivery strategy.

However, the rapid demise of traditional distribution models for content are forcing every player in the content delivery chain to start to evaluate a more long-term strategy around technology investment to support these services. Today’s generation of consumers are embracing the online channel for content acquisition thanks to the benefits of real-time access, easy search and a growing inventory of content. CSPs and media/entertainment organizations are leaving significant revenue on the table by not making content accessible and by not investing in the tools and wherewithal to support a digital distribution model.

Content revenue cannot be captured effectively without stronger collaboration between the communications service provider community and the media and entertainment community.  The convergence of communications and media in this market segment creates an excellent opportunity for telecommunications providers to play a more important role in the distribution of content and demonstrate that closer collaboration will create revenue upsides for all parties in question. Effective content distribution cannot take place without intelligent delivery mechanisms in place, and content creators must embrace the open-ended distribution model driven by multi-party collaboration if they want to monetize all aspects of digital content. Subsequently, these creators should also build a robust inventory strategy that will allow real time access to all types of content, and real time revenue collection based on consumption.

We at TM Forum feel that better collaboration between all parties in the digital supply chain is now more essential than ever, considering the uncertain economic times ahead. Revenue growth can only come from a greater breadth of services on offer to the end user, and what better way to offer more services than to build strong collaborative partners that can help create a richer customer experience, and subsequently, a greater likelihood of the customer to spending more money with you.