In a previous article, “The Internet’s gone Video: What does that mean to operators?” I gave a preview of the presentation I planned to give at the Dialogic One Event in the keynote session “Carrier Video Services Trends and Opportunities” on the 21st October in San Diego. The presentation, shown below, is split into four main sections covering:
- The history of carrier video services;
- The impact of the internet going video on the industry;
- How operators are responding with open innovation to address the gap between their performance and that of the internet with respect to video; and
- Some real-world developer case studies.
Alan, while reading thru “Video Carrier Services”, I agree with many of the points you pose and address, however the principle issues around Video Carrier Services are: perceived industry need for standardisation for a “carrier” implementation; value of open vs.closed content within their percieved value chain; development of the User interface (screen size and speed of search/response) whereby advertising takes on a 1-to-1 relationship. With both the industry and economy changing, what I would like to challenge you to add are some predictions on which current owners of voice will make it to video?
Good question. I sometimes position telephony as the original UGC (User Generated Content) application. An operator provides an empty audio pipe between two people, and they fill it with conversation. As operators continue to transform their networks to all-IP, making it easier to fill the pipe with things other than voice; and video telephony enabled equipment continues to increase in penetration; it will pass the point where you’re more likely than not to hold a successful video call. So the people providing pipes will continue to provide pipes, just the pipes can have more in them.
Today there are many web-based video communication solutions, generally focused on verticals, e.g. intra-business video comms, informal video comms over Skype with the kids when a parent is on the road. I see the business video comms vertical being an area where an operator’s position in the value chain enables them to link these verticals, making inter-business and B2C video communications more common place – when video device penetration is sufficient.
But video communications is a small % of the video traffic on the net. Most of the traffic is related to video content. And the person who owns the content is king!