At the Mobile World Congress, Huawei Technologies continued its drive to create platforms that help telecom operators and other service providers realise improved revenue streams. With this, consumers will also have a great experience on one video service platform. This year Huawei is focussing on collaboration, where they invite third parties to have input on developing and working on various aspects that help improve the user experience. Video is all about content, so there is need to collaborate with content providers.
In his keynote, Huawei’s deputy chairman and rotating CEO Eric Xu said “in today’s world, video is not an option, it is a must, and it will become a part of our life”. He went on to say by the year 2020 video will account for 50% of global mobile revenues compared to 25% in 2016.
Huawei aims to be the enabler of telco success by providing professional business consulting services to enable success in video, build content aggregation capabilities to help telcos reduce costs and remove difficulties associated with content acquisition (trial first in Africa and middle East ). They also aim to build cloud-native convergent video platforms, invest in video chips and open middle ware, build E2E networks that support video as a basic service and build capabilities in video service planning design integration and experience management.
According to Mr Xu, Entertainment video will account for the majority of revenue – up to $650 billion. Industry video that covers aspects like commerce, education and surveillance and others – will account for $350 billion and communications video like video conferencing, video messaging and unified communications – will be up to $18 billion.
The company’s traditional business is networks and IT infrastructure. Though they also manufacture phones and tablets, they do not create videos, which means they have to work with content and other service providers.
There are a number of platforms available for video. The Video operation platform is where you have the big data analytics, video support systems, and next generation service quality management for the video. It basically does your data analytics so out of every video some patterns are found that can be co related to the user experience or usage habits.
The video processing and distribution platform enables videos to be processed and coded and have the private or public cloud and you can also add or remove some over heads. The private or public or hybrid cloud will then either store or distribute the video.
The system requires a medium which can be used to distribute video which can be ADSL, fibre, cable, satellite, LTE or 5G and different screens can be used. For different videos you need different types of networks.
To have any sort of data on user experience any operator may first need to find a location where a video is being played and who is playing it, the average income per house hold, the number of people in that area, if their data consumption high or low , population and what kind of medium they are using. They identify the value area of video depending on these factors.
Mr Xu went on to say fragmented content needs a single point of entry and that around the globe there are 600+ Telecom operators, 1000+ content providers, 100+ Content operators So there is so much choice when it comes to video content but once you want to aggregate the content with the consumer that becomes difficult.
Content aggregators do not want to give up their ownership on the billing relationship and also on the account that means a lot of challenges for the operators to be able to run the video business.
For consumers not a single content aggregator can offer all the content that a consumer wants to access and as a result consumers have to buy from different service providers.
They might not get what they want from a content aggregator to which they are a member so they prefer getting it from a single point of entry. One account, one billing relationship and they get access to all the content.
Telecom operators are the ones in the best position to offer a single point of entry for consumers.
By Vardis Banga
