IPTV billing road map still on the horizon

If that's the vision, what's the reality? The path likely will be a phased approach. As a first step, service providers today “all recognize the need for consistent mediation output into a consolidated billing engine inside the back office,” said Ray Bennett, director of broadband marketing for billing vendor Amdocs. “Bringing all platforms through one mediation hub provides one source of the truth.” As for real-time capabilities and the new service and marketing models those enable, “we're not seeing commercialization of real time becoming an issue just yet,” Bennett said. “They understand it, but we're not there yet.”

That doesn't mean that time won't come soon. Service providers need to put those capabilities on their IPTV road maps, billing experts agreed.

“What we're really evolving to is billing systems for IPTV that become much more real-time and understand customer behaviors,” said Convergys' Reynolds. “At the moment, such capabilities would offer competitive advantage, but soon they'll become the new baseline.”

REAL-TIME BILLING: WHAT'S POSSIBLE?

With more convergent, real-time billing capabilities, IPTV providers can experiment with a wide variety of new service bundles and marketing approaches.

Family account plans/parental controls:

By better understanding usage, IPTV providers could give parents more control over the use of their systems — for instance, limiting a child's usage of VOD — or make promotional offers to individual household members.

Usage discounts/usage thresholds:

By measuring activity, service providers could reward heavy users or put some thresholds on heavy consumers of high-bandwidth content, such as high-definition movies.

Loyalty programs:

Akin to usage discounts/thresholds but more marketing-savvy, real-time billing systems could use point systems to award active users.

Real-time promos:

Promotions could be injected right into the content stream, for instance, offering a dollar off a second VOD movie rental immediately following the first or offering cross-service promos such as extra cell phone minutes for trying new IPTV content.

Amazon-style recommendations:

“If you like (or have watched this), you'll probably also like this … .”

Long-tail/a la carte:

A la carte doesn't seem a great value proposition in traditional TV/video environments, but when you bring in the long tail of Internet content, suddenly accessing — and paying for — highly tailored content begins to make sense. It also could make over-the-top providers partners rather than competitors.

Build your own bundle:

Imagine inviting an IPTV customer to a Web site where they create their own custom IPTV content bundle — plus other services — with the bundle rated in real time.