IPTV billing road map still on the horizon

For major IPTV players, truly converged triple-play billing is finally within reach — a major milestone that gives telco video upstarts the bundling and promotional tools they need to make their initial forays against cable and satellite a success.

But competing with the status quo in the video world — flat-rate pricing with limited tiers and simple video-on-demand (VOD) — isn't a long-term winning proposition. Nor is it a plateau on which IPTV rivals are satisfied to remain themselves.

But at least for now, in most corners of the IPTV world, more sophisticated real-time charging and billing capabilities — and the pricing and marketing strategies to match — remain more vision than reality.

When it comes to billing, “the basics today, we feel, are well-covered,” said Alice Bartram of billing vendor Comverse, which provides billing services for video to approximately 20 customers around the globe. That said, monitoring customer activity in real time and making promotional offers or combining post-paid with more a la carte consumption is much more common in the wireless market than on IPTV platforms, she said. Telco video providers are much more likely to “take care of the basics of billing on day 1 and then phase in [more sophisticated billing capabilities] over time.”

The two major U.S. telco video providers — AT&T with its IPTV-based U-verse and Verizon with its fiber-rich FiOS — declined to go into depth on their billing strategies. Representatives from both companies, however, stressed that they have triple-play (and even quadruple-play) billing capabilities in place today, thanks to the massive investments in time and money to get their high-profile video services off the ground.

Yet even triple-play billing remains a challenge for many new video entrants.

“Unfortunately, depending on how long [a service provider] has been around, their existing voice billing platforms may be next to useless in accounting for the complexities of billing non-voice services, especially when it comes to bundling and VOD — often required for IPTV services,” said Tony Poulos, head of the revenue management sector for the TM Forum.