Streaming media is maturing from the level of "gee-whiz" eye candy on the web to a serious source of revenue for providers of IP-based content. To make that evolution a reality, however, those providers are going to have to be able to support it and bill for it, which could prove tricky because of the myriad ways in which streaming media is going to be used.
Streaming media will require back-office systems that can handle its unique characteristics, such as bursts of increased bandwidth demand for major streaming video events, including pay-per-view concerts and sports events. Provisioning systems will have to be able to turn up and down levels of service to ensure customers receive the quality they'll demand for the premium prices they are likely to pay. At the same time, those back offices also will be forced to handle issues that telephony providers have never really had to deal with in the past, such as protection of an artist's intellectual property rights.
Acotec Inc. (www.acotec.com), a developer of connectivity management software, is currently working to develop products that will capture usage data in order to provide accounting and affirmation for streaming media, says Ken Hilliard, CTO of the company, which has its headquarters in Sausalito, Calif.
"And we want to go further than that," Hilliard says. "We're going to provide provisioning along with that so we can affect the quality of service for the streaming pipes."
Acotec plans to provide the web platform that customers can visit to order the event or service, and provide identity management, rights management, and authorization and authentication services so the commercial part of the transaction can be identified properly. The company also plans to provide the ability to audit the transfer of copyrighted material in order to ensure creators of such material can be properly compensated for it and reduce the risk of repudiation--a venue such as a bar or other establishments acting as a sub-broker of a streaming-video concert or closed-circuit sports event such as a championship bout that afterward claims they never received it.
Along with the provisioning and auditing of such content, billing will be a crucial issue in ensuring the profitability of streaming media to service providers.
Sponsorships, subscriptions, tiered, flat-rate and usage-based services, and many other forms of service have to be addressed by billing in order to capture the revenue. At the same time, content providers likely are going to have to share that revenue with a number of partners, not to mention the carriers controlling the pipes through which the streaming media will flow. Service and content providers are going to need sophisticated OSS and billing systems that are highly flexible and scalable if they are going to be successful with streaming media.
Cupertino, Calif.-based IP biller Portal Software Inc. earlier this year formed strategic partnerships with a pair of streaming-media companies: Santa Clara, Calif.-based P-Cube Inc. (www.p-cube.com), whose Service Engineering product is a broadband IP service-management and provisioning platform; and Reliacast Inc. (www.reliacast.com), a Herndon, Va.-based software developer whose flagship product is its Reliacast Solution audience management system.
P-Cube's platform operates at the service layer and gives communications service providers the ability to create on IP networks CLASS-like services, such as call forwarding, Caller ID and other revenue producers, including streaming media.
By partnering with Portal, P-Cube was able to make the Service Engineering product capable of video streaming and tiered services at multiple levels, while provisioning the individual bandwidth requirements of each customer. Using its reporting capabilities, Service Engineering users can recognize when customers are nearing the thresholds of their service levels and offer those customers the option of switching on the fly to a higher service level.
Having a billing system "capable of actually utilizing the event [information] that P-Cube can deliver," such as on-the-fly increases in bandwidth usage, is going to be key, says David Mayes, P-Cube vice president of business development. "Quite candidly, there are billing vendors that are at different stages of development of these capabilities," he adds.
A billing system will need a high degree of scalability capable of dealing with sudden spikes in activity, such as when a major event is offered on a pay-per-view basis. It must also have the flexibility to add and delete a variety of services and events, and to record the myriad ways revenue will be generated from those services and events.
Reliacast provides "conditional access at the edge," says Tom Klaff, the company's CEO. The Reliacast Solution uses an "electronic ticket," which is a mechanism that authenticates an end user that is already authorized to view a streaming media event. Users could receive authorization for an event in a variety of ways. They could simply pay for the event, or live in an area targeted for the event, or have met some condition, such as buying an event sponsor's products. Service providers have the flexibility to stipulate any of a wide assortment of requirements.
"It all depends on the model" used by the service provider, Klaff says. "It ensures that those people who are supposed to be on that specific event get the application." The solution also provides protection against denial-of-service attacks and extremely heavy user demand, which could cause server faults or failures. The software also analyzes data about the audience, providing a sort of Nielsen report about the users, while also providing real-time reporting about use and distribution. This helps service providers make decisions about network resources.
"At the end, from a billing perspective, all of this information is being captured and reported and can be pumped in Portal's system for billing," Klaff says. "It really does map to what kind of module you want to do. If it's a live pay-per-view event, that's one module. If it's a video download for just a movie, that's another module. If it's a subscription on a monthly basis, that's another module."
Accurate accountability and control of who is gaining access to streaming media events can be critical for proper allocation of resources and to ensure that as much revenue as possible is produced. "Really, we're talking about building intelligence into the network because it would give visibility to an end-user audience," Klaff says.
In addition to the P-Cube and Reliacast partnerships, Portal also has been working with streaming media platform providers Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) and RealNetworks Inc. (www.realnetworks.com). Portal is also working with companies such as Inktomi Corp. (www.inktomi.com), Kasenna Inc. (www.kasenna.com) and Network Appliance Inc., whose products support Windows Media Player and RealSystem; as well as "other players who have implemented solutions for those formats on their caching platforms, for example, for content distribution networks," says Sanjay Swamy, Portal's senior director of market development.
In providing and billing for streaming media, there are basically three results, two of which are bad, Swamy says.
"The ideal case is that everybody's request is processed and everything goes off well," he says. "The second is that transactions do not happen and the customer basically keeps getting a, 'Server is down' message, and you have a pissed-off customer who is not going to come to you again, which is highly undesirable. And the third thing that can go wrong is, because a server goes down, you just say, 'Fine, we'll just feed every customer in the world,' and you don't collect the revenue for it, which is also not a very acceptable solution, especially if you owe somebody a royalty for this [event]."
To ensure that the latter two situations don't occur, Portal's Distributed Nonstop Architecture (DNA) has failover mechanisms that capture and hold all the transactions in a queue, regardless of whether or how well the servers are handling customer demand.
Using this architecture, "The system does indeed bill for all the transactions," Swamy says. "Most importantly, you don't drop any transactions."
Making all that a reality is complex. Some service providers don't want to hear that.
"A lot of companies, when they talk to us, say, 'Well, we have a fairly simple business model, why do we need a sophisticated billing system?'" Swamy says. "And the answer is, plan for success and don't plan just to get into business now and worry about success later."
A billing system is going to need "bulletproof reliability," Mayes says. Without the proper billing system in place, a service provider's streaming media offerings will lack a proper foundation, which means its plans for realizing serious revenue from that technology will be little more than a house of cards.
"The ideal case is that everybody's request is processed and everything goes off well. [If] transactions do not happen and the customer basically keeps getting a, 'Server is down' message, you have a pissed-off customer who is not going to come to you again, which is highly undesirable." Sanjay Swamy, senior director of market development, Portal Software Inc.
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