Service providers still have delusions of grandeur

Rating: building walls as everyone is tearing them down

By Annie Turner

York, England-based ioko is demonstrating its solution to deliver digital media through television, computer and mobile screens to users at the IBC event. ioko is a specialist systems integrator and provider of managed services for media companies.

On the plus side, the company acknowledges that each type of screen displays distinct characteristics and user requirements. Each delivery network has its own technical considerations. These projects require not only technical excellence, but also an appreciation of the media environment and the local consumer culture.

Oh good, a real grasp of the basics, but the following is distinctly worrying:

“Another client is a major mobile service provider with over 50 million subscribers. They want to replace services provided by partners with a platform that they will own and operate themselves. They need a content management system that can cater for hundreds of thousands of items and support thousands of different device types.”

This is another service provider with that all too common affliction – control freakery. Its true that data services have resulted in operators bolting new kit onto legacy billing systems and that this Frankenstein approach to billing and associated business processes continues to create a variety of problems, with operators around the world collectively losing revenues over EUR 3bn (USD4bn) in 2004, according to iGillottResearch.

This leakage is predicted to rise to EUR13.73bn (USD18.5bn), or 22.9% of data and media services revenue, by 2009 through a combination of operators launching many new services and an increasingly involved food chain.

On the other hand, chucking the whole lot out and starting again is radical, expensive and time-consuming. And you can’t cease operations while you’re doing it. And there is every chance that by the time you’ve finished, the world will have moved on anyway.

No single party can control an entire ecosystem – that’s the whole point of an ecosystem as opposed to a mono culture. And as the world’s most advanced data services market, Japan, now has an off-portal market as big as on-portal, which will be the way the rest of us go eventually, how will a mono culture fit in there? It won’t.

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