Providing Video Content: Operators’ Struggle vs. Consumer Demand

By Dr. Marwan Jabri

Mobile users are consuming video more than ever before, especially with the advent of smartphones, tablets and high speed 4G/LTE networks. Just take a look at the latest Comcast commercial, which boasts the ability for consumers to get cable services delivered right to their smartphones and tablets.

While entertainment like movies and TV shows will be the biggest driver for the adoption of video-on-demand services, there are several other avenues for growth that operators have been embracing. Content such as live sport updates, breaking news, and user-generated content have steadily gained consumer adoption. Emerging video services, such as video vault (or personal lockers), where a user can store and share instantly videos with friends and family have also appeared in the marketplace. Adoption of these video services will continue to grow as video brings a truly real-time, multimedia experience to the fingertip of consumers. Furthermore, the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets, drastic improvement in devices’ screen resolution, as well as data-friendly pricing have all contributed to the emergence of mobile video services.

This growth represents both an opportunity and a challenge for operators. While the adoption of mobile video services represents a tremendous ARPU and significant content opportunities, it also exposes operators to complex and resource-intensive, video rendering processes. Operators must constantly balance consumers’ appetite for video and sustain adequate video quality without overwhelming their own internal resources.

Technical Challenges

The underlying challenge to deliver video to mobile devices is video rendering. This video-rendering process is further complicated by the multitude of smartphone and tablets that are currently available in the marketplace. Operators normally offer approximately 40 smartphones and tablets at any given time. Each of these devices has distinct screen size, resolution, and a media player that supports different video codecs. A video must be rendered for each screen size, each resolution, and each codec before it can be distributed.

Video rendering consists of transcoding, transrating and scaling. Transcoding is the ability to take existing video content and change it into a different codec. Transrating is the process to convert media content prepared for one bandwidth (bit rate) into another. Scaling is adjusting the video to the proper targeted video resolution. To ensure optimal consumer experience, a video must achieve a proper balance among codec, bit rate and resolution.

Leveraging Value-Added Services for Video Content

Instead of incurring substantial CAPEX and OPEX to address these technical challenges, operators can leverage value-added services (VAS) providers at a significantly lower cost. As their customers increasingly demand video content, operators should revisit their business strategies and determine the best approach for providing these services.

VAS providers can provide the critical components required to help operators deliver a high quality customer experience at a reasonable cost. Furthermore, using VAS providers to handle the technical and platform aspects allows operators to focus on their customers’ needs from a business perspective and work to improve the overall customer experience, which will ultimately differentiate operators from their competitors. This becomes more and more critical as operators increasingly find themselves in competition with over-the-top (OTT) players (OS vendors, handset makers and app developers), which are benefitting from mobile video and video content growth while mobile telecom operators struggle not to be relegated as bit-pipe providers. The operators challenge is a) not to get squeezed by the OTT folks and b) to drive topline growth. Working with a VAS provider can relieve many of the pain points highlighted in this article while generating new opportunities.

Dr. Marwan Jabri is vice president, Video Products Unit for OnMobile Global and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.