Cloud is key to exploiting multiscreen video market

According to global networking technology company, Cisco, 2012 was a watershed in the way we watch video: it was the first time that online viewing of video surpassed traditional viewing, and the company projects an uncertain future for many industry players with the rapid evolution of online video to multiscreen online video.

Cisco says some of the greatest innovation is occurring around multiscreen delivery and related services, driven by strong consumer demand and a big push from content owners, content aggregators, service providers, broadcasters, and consumer electronics manufacturers.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that solutions for multiscreen video remain extremely disparate thanks to quickly changing consumer behaviour, fragmented market structures and the existing asset base of service providers. Therefore content owners and providers of video services need to create compelling and efficient multiscreen offers that take account of the many combinations of devices, networks, service platforms and content offers both inside and outside consumers’ homes.

Leading provider of ITPV solutions Combitel’s CEO Eugene Razbash says they are one of the few the companies who is helping service providers find appropriate hardware and software solutions to facilitate the deployments in vertical enterprise markets as well as for domestic situations.

This, Cisco says, drives an important question for each player in the video ecosystem: Which control points or solution elements of the customer experience must be owned by the solution provider, and which must be provided by others? To answer this question, Cisco has published a white paper ‘Streaming Under the Clouds - Solutions for Multiscreen Video Delivery’ to “identify the key service control points and compare options for acquiring them, particularly home-screen and mobile-analytics integration ... [and] explain how an underlying cloud architecture can provide both increased economies of scale for homogeneous environments as well as access to scale economies and related volume discounts in heterogeneous environments.”

The white paper identifies five principal participants in the multiscreen value chain: service providers, content owners, broadcasters, over-the-top/web service providers and consumer-electronics manufacturers. It says that all are taking clear action to create a powerful multiscreen video user experience that complements their primary business models.

The white paper is primarily directed at telecommunications service providers to help them counter the threat of being reduced to mere carriers of bits - in ever increasing volumes - while the other principal players cream off the bulk of whatever end users are paying for content and services.

The conclusion is that service providers have a great opportunity to simplify the current, rather chaotic, situation where there are multiple solutions and multiple architectures by leveraging the flexibility of a cloud-based approach to multiscreen video service delivery.

“If executed, this approach could enable a service provider to enjoy significant capex/opex cost reductions and even greater scale efficiencies, all while creating new commercial options,” the white paper says.

Cloud is key, it argues “By taking advantage of established principles coming from the software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) architectures and related operational models, greater flexibility can be achieved at a lower cost. In addition, a cloud-based solution is more modular and a natural choice for the required software architecture. It can support a number of market implementations, while keeping customer data segregated and allowing for service customisation by market.”

Its advice to service providers is unequivocal: “The service provider community should move decisively in this direction to meet the pending rush to video. This win-win, no-regrets investment strategy should be at the top of every CEO’s agenda. It will allow service providers to protect and grow their customer relationships, improve innovation, and better monetise their assets.”