By Simon Trudelle, Senior Director Product Marketing
IP-based content delivery offers many benefits – cost-savings, improved user experience and all-screen reach to name a few. But equally, it presents its share of obstacles.
Yesterday’s strengths must be adapted to drive success in tomorrow’s business environment before they become barriers. Here are 9 potential headaches service providers will have to consider before they take the plunge into an IP architecture.
1. End-to-end assessment
A new media delivery method means examining every part of your business model and assessing the requirements and opportunities for change.
2. It takes time
It can take a long time to migrate – it involves not just deploying new apps and CPE in customers’ home, but also improvements to the headend in the network and more.
3. Think of your legacy!
Working out which legacy infrastructure is still useful requires advanced architecture and planning work.
4. Customer support
Supporting both traditional TV and OTT video utilisation makes customer support functions more complex and could be a resource issue for some operators.
5. Planning for new services
IP migration would create an immediate need to plan for new services (ones that consume more bandwidth than ever before), including 4K, 8K and VR.
6. New analytics
The operator would be required to enable a whole new set of analytics if they want to take advantage of new data-related opportunities.
7. User experience
Continuity of user experience across devices would have to be planned in from the start – that way, you avoid alienating the existing customer base with half-built solutions that discourage usage.
8. Content rights
A migration strategy must consider the renegotiation of existing content rights and geo-blocking agreements to add OTT services into the offering.
9. Security!
And of course, there are extra security requirements for an OTT TV delivery system – ones that address multiscreen delivery and provide more control over distribution.
Contact us to learn how we can help you smartly transition to IP!