Five multi-company live demonstrations offer an in-depth, hands-on focus on lubricating the value chain for personalized services and advertising-based business models at Management World Orlando

Today, TM Forum announced the next important milestone in its highly acclaimed Content Encounter initiative. Championed by AT&T, Swisscom and Verizon and supported by NAB Show as an industry partner, Content Encounter 3 provides collaboratively developed solutions to the challenges of creating, delivering and monetizing digital media services in an increasingly complex value chain, based on specific real-world operational issues.

Content Encounter is an incubator where players from across the value chain – from content owners and distributors, to communications service providers and device makers – come together to experiment with innovative ways to solve the most pressing end-to-end problems hampering widespread roil-out of advanced, content-based services. The process begins with service and content providers placing their issues and requirements on the table which the supply chain then sets about to solve.

Jim Warner, Vice Chairman and Head of Content, Media and Advertising Sectors for TM Forum said, “The market for digital media type services is driven by ever changing relationships between customers and their providers, and service providers and their suppliers across the value chain. Today we are seeing the demand for online, web delivered video slowing as it moves from the early adopter phase to a more mainstream phase. Coupled with the failure of most web sites to effectively monetize their content inventory, we believe there are significant new revenue opportunities for telecom and cable operators to form a win-win relationship with content owners and give them a new channel to market based on some of the unique capabilities the network owner has.”

Content Encounter examines the new business models and technologies across the service supply chain from creation to consumption. It assesses their impact on revenue, operations and the customer experience then publishes best practices and standards for managing these services.

In Content Encounter 3, 20 participating companies will focus on 5 major areas involving the on-boarding and assurance of content, portfolio and revenue management and e-commerce and advertising for both telecom and cable. The standards and business models underpinning these demonstrations will also be presented enabling attendees to get a behind the scenes view of how things are integrated.

Content Revenue Management is addressed in a demo featuring Convergys and cVidya, showing working solutions based around TM Forum’s best practices, with specific input from Swisscom, based on actual revenue management issues, including revenue leakage.

According to Theodora Simeonidis-Orenstein, Swisscom, “Swisscom teamed with Convergys and cVidya Newtworks to create a Content Revenue demo to meet a real-life challenge. The resulting solution allows Swisscom to enhance the existing control framework on content revenue management, maximise profits and strengthen our customer services.”

The monetization of content-based services and advertising based business models is addressed in another demonstration with input from Verizon. The Content Encounter 3 team will demonstrate the delivery and monetization of on-deck and off-deck content, as well as personalized advertising with the ability to trace the revenue throughout and address partner settlement and service profitability.

And for the first time, a cable orientated demonstration will show the personalization of advertising utilizing TM Forum, CableLabs and SCTE standard interfaces.

Content Encounter 3 will also be showing an end-to-end content lifecycle demonstration and how content is brought on board from multiple sources and multiple partners in an automated fashion, together with early developments on recent TM Forum standard interfaces around metadata, payment, processing/apportionment/charging policies, sales reporting, customer care, SQM (QoS) and usage data.

By working in a collaborative way across different industry groups, Content Encounter 3 participants will pinpoint solutions, exploit opportunities and form profitable partnerships.

For more information about Content Encounter 3, TM Forum’s Management World Orlando and the Digital Commerce and Advertising Summit, please visit their website: www.tmforum.org/orlando

Descriptions and lists of participants for all of the demonstrations

Stop 1: Onboarding, Management and Assurance
Champion: AT&T
Demonstration Team: Alcatel-Lucent, Convergys, Cognizant, IBM, Motorola
This Demonstration will go through the on-boarding of a partner, its application, and content; then showing the service consumption options and concluding with the end-to-end assurance view.

Stop 2: E-commerce and Advertising
Champion: Verizon
Demonstration Team: Call Genie, eBizMobility, Microsoft, Motorola, Telcordia, Subex
In this demonstration, you will see how it is possible to offer off-deck content and still make money. Also, discover how to improve customer acceptance by delivering targeted advertisements in a converged environment. Finally, look at a dashboard that shows revenue operations and service profitability for each of the services in the demonstration.

Stop 3: Portfolio Management and Operational Assurance
Demonstration Team: Subex, Tribold
This demonstration is all about merging 2 views of the business - revenue and their portfolio of content products and services – into a quality cycle. It looks at the relationships between key systems and processes and how they impact time to market, cost to market and innovation. By eliminating redundant data in multiple systems and providing improved access to the right information, decision makers are able to have an accurate, up-to-date visibility of the product lifecycle and portfolio performance.

Stop 4: Personalized Advertising for Cable & IPTV
Demonstration Team: Arris, Biap, Blackarrow, Sigma
This demonstration showcases an integrated solution that communication and entertainment service providers can use to effectively compete with highly targeted new media advertising models through leveraging a common infrastructure and emerging standards to efficiently enable highly focused advertising offerings. Video and entertainment service providers will want to see this demonstration to see how subscriber information, demographic data, and service information can be accessed and shared in order to qualify customers to enable lucrative advanced advertising offerings.

Stop 5: Content Revenue Management
Champion: Swisscom
Demonstration Team: Convergys, cVidya
Using requirements provided to the team directly from Swisscom, see how communications service providers can provide an open platform to content providers and, at the same time, assure trustable and profitable content services. Learn how to verify that content charges are within an agreed charging range before they enter the billing system, and how to detect, analyze, and manage abnormal content provider behavior to avoid customer service issues.

Stop 6: Creating Standards for Emerging Business Models
Presenters: Satyam, TM Forum
The final stop on the Content Encounter 3 tour is about developing the standards and best practices that can support the emerging business models and make them real. This includes the new TM Forum work on standard interfaces and metadata, payment processing, sales reporting, customer care, SQM (QoS) and usage data plus how to apply existing work such as IPDR and standards from the cable industry.

About the TM Forum

With more than 700 member companies in 75 countries, the TM Forum is the world’s leading trade consortium focused on enabling digital services. Serving the information, communications and entertainment industries, the Forum provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the way that services are created, delivered and charged. Members include the majority of the world’s service providers, network operators, software suppliers, equipment suppliers and systems integrators.

The TM Forum currently facilitates over 80 technical projects and provides extensive training, conferencing and information services to its members. Through its initiatives to help providers move to low cost, high quality ‘lean’ processes, the TM Forum helps its members automate business processes and work seamlessly across various parts of the service delivery chain. The organization provides industry benchmarks, guidebooks, process and software frameworks and downloadable software standards. These give service providers the direction and specific roadmaps to achieve much greater business efficiency and operational flexibility.

For more information, please visit their website: www.tmforum.org