Telecom & OTT – a perfect marriage?

Around half of mobile data traffic accounts for video consumption. One of the major revenues for telecom companies is mobile data. And if they own the content too, wouldn’t it be more profitable to them?

Ties amongst telecom companies, cable providers and content owners are going to be an industry trend in the days to come. AT&T, US’s 2^nd largest wireless carrier, brought DirectTV, the country’s largest satellite Pay TV operator. This enabled cross selling of content between mobile and TV. In Europe, Vodafone group has tied up with London based cable operator Liberty Global PLC to provide a combined service in Netherlands.

Content consumption is shifting to video streaming service from linear TV because of convenience as well as lower costs of these services in developed nations. Convenience of on-demand and availability on mobile devices is fueling the trend. A converged service offering from telecom and cable is expected to become the norm in the days to come. In countries where cable prices are low, telecom companies will have to bank aggressively on the convenience part.

(Also read: Whether OTT should be regulated or not?)

It is in a way a win-win for both parties – wireless carriers have been wanting to increase their customer base by using TV’s distribution base, while cable companies benefit from moving their beyond fixed lines. Also network infrastructure which is an investment made by telecom and cable operators can be easily negotiated if the content owner is not an outsider – which is a prevailing fight amongst OTT providers and network investors. This would also help lower programming costs, and also bring about an integrated service where similar content would be available on both TV and mobile devices. This would help them draw in more subscribers who would be able to stream TV programs on their phones, get wireless internet and linear TV in the same ecosystem. And this synergy would help telecom and cable maintain a fair fight against purely OTT content players.

As a Mobile Service provider or ISP, the challenge to catch up and launch your own streaming services is quite a task, you may already have your competition providing OTT services to its subscribers, and for some of your subscribers to option of switching over to your competitor just because of this services will be the deciding factor when it comes to equal plan and data pricing. In such a situation, spending about 12-18 months on developing a OTT product may not be ideal. Muvi can help MSO’s / ISP / Telecoms to launch their own OTT service and roll out the same in record time (read weeks and not months) without burdening the businesses with IT / infrastructure costs, dev and IT teams or management headaches in setup, launching and running your own OTT platform. And Muvi offers a complete end-to-end ready to use solution, you do not have to go anywhere else for anything else. Sign up and experience a free no obligations trial.