By Tim Young, Editor-in-Chief, Pipeline

Since its first iteration at the 2007 Management World Americas Show in Dallas last year, Content Encounter has been something of a feather in TM Forum's cap. It is a venue for something that's quite rare in the OSS/BSS space: Practical and tangible demonstration of viable, working technologies. 

Located in the center of Forumville, TM Forum's headquarters for information and demonstrations on the Expo floor, Content Encounter is a venue for live demos of the end-to-end solutions that encapsulate the realities of the digital and multimedia marketplace.

Mark Francis, AT&T VP Global Network Operations Center, says "Content Encounter from TM Forum offers a compelling glimpse into a highly automated, end-to-end solution for scaling and managing vast amounts of content across a wide range of platforms and devices."

Content Encounter addresses the changing content environment as the role of communications companies continues to grow and change, and new players come onto a scene traditionally dominated by telcos. “The content is not owned by the telco anymore,” says Sudeesh Yezhuvath, COO of Subex, which is involved in Content Encounter. 

More than 20 companies are involved, and the event includes demonstrations of content lifecycle, advertising-based business models, advanced services creation and delivery, analytics to drive decision-making, service profitability, and revenue assurance, as well as other topics that deal with the delivery of next-generation content. 

Content Encounter Phase 3 combines approaches and offerings from different vendors, service providers and companies that are outside of the traditional telecommunications structure and are more recent additions to TM Forum. In doing so, Content Encounter provides an opportunity to see different companies exploring real problems in a meaningful and practical way.

“It really has allowed us to push the boundaries and explore in a safe environment, which is important, but also, it drives the openness, which is important,” says Tom Forsyth of Telcordia, which is working on the E-Commerce & Advertising project within the Content Encounter. “These are real products.  We use our real-time charging and billing. We have the eBIZ.mobility staff.  We have the CallGenie staff.  We have Microsoft Silverlight here.  These are real products.  You could go and deploy this.” 

Furthermore, the incorporation of new and different companies provides new perspective on the communications climate as a whole. “I believe the telecommunications industry as a whole, in order to drive revenue and drive ARPU on a subscriber basis, has to look to video services and content services,” says David Stengle of BlackArrow, which works in the video advertising space. “To fund that growth, advertising is going to play an increasingly important role.”  The growing importance of advertising's role in the communications space has drawn companies like BlackArrow into TM Forum and into Content Encounter. 

In addition, Content Encounter involves cable companies, as an indication of the ongoing 'blurring of the lines' between the telco and cable space.  It represents a new stage of cable involvement in TM Forum. “There have been cable catalysts before, but this bridges the gap between cable and telcos,” says Brian Cappellani, CTO of Sigma Systems. 

“A lot of the services I see, as someone coming from the advertising side are about business agility and more flexibility,” says BlackArrow's Stengle.  “That translates into higher margins, better efficiency, and a more satisfying experience for the subscriber.”

The exhibit involves a guided tour through several stops in the value chain.