NOTE: Business model considerations are mostly applicable for Indian market. Solution considerations are common across the market.
Business model: It can be a tri-party model wherein a VAS service provider uses the hardware/software platform from a platform vendor and procures the content from a content producer. The revenue earned gets split with these players. Now the service provider can either host the complete solution in his own data center (which is the preferred model) or the complete solution is put in a telecom operator’s data center. In either of these cases, service provider takes responsibility of integrating the solution with billing as well as SDP storefront. However the challenges in these integration are – identifying right content for a diverse country like India, content discovery, service assurance through CSR and the fair settlement with operator.
From solution perspective, considerations are:
- support for both CS (H324M) & PS (IP) services and related protocols. However till ubiquitous 3G coverage is available, better to offer CS based video service access
- for video services, whether the video gateway to be placed centrally or co-located with the MGW. Video content optimizer, video transcoder
- bandwidth committed to the end-user and the bandwidth planned for each MHz of spectrum. Accordingly the content files with appropriate bit rates to be stored in the content management system. Based on variation in bandwidth available for the end-user dynamically select appropriate bit rate content file
- handset client to unify the content services – could be with proprietary codec that optimizes the bandwidth utilization
- campaign manager to track user usage and offer advice on similar content. Related support in the real-time rating engine
- on-boarding 3rd party apps and content service providers. A well-defined network abstraction and service/subscriber management capabilities is a must to expand the ecosystem
