You need a trusted and experienced partner to launch and scale your IPTV venture. Accenture can help you navigate the technical, cultural and operational challenges involved in a successful IPTV offering.

You need a technology infrastructure integrating best-of-breed components. These include:

• A network.
• A video platform.
• Operational support systems/business support systems (OSS/BSS).

Accenture Communications Solutions can help ensure these components work in sync. We offer a suite of leading-edge business solutions for communication service providers. Our solutions are pre-packaged and ready-to-use with a robust common integration framework—aligned with industry standards.

Addressing important IPTV business issues

Telecom executives tasked with scaling an IPTV business must deal with a number of common business issues. Some of the most significant are outlined below – along with an explanation of how Accenture Communications Solutions can help to address them:

• Achieving differentiation through content: Operators need to ensure that their commercial offerings are significantly better than existing cable and satellite providers. Differentiation is not just about channels – it is also about delivering a wide variety of content, as well as meeting consumer demands for more personalized video and IPTV applications. This means managing relationships with content providers worldwide, segmenting the customer market and providing as many content bundles (ie Video-on-demand, TV services) as possible. Accenture offers content management solutions (including business process outsourcing) that enable operators to tailor and/or aggregate their content, targeting bundles at specific geographical and demographic market segments. We understand that driving up ARPU is not just about having the right asset and the right processes in place. It is also about delivering the right service, at the right time and at the right cost.
  
  
• Providing service assurance: If they are to deliver converged applications across home networks, operators must be equipped to manage and monitor the full range of services available to their customers, from high-speed data and IPTV to VoIP. However, increasing complexity in converged home environments means that specific in-home implementations are much harder to monitor and services are more difficult to control. Having secured the right to deploy content into customers’ homes, operators must be confident that they can control the onward transmission and maintain the licensing rules of that content. At the same time, if they are to minimize expensive truck-rolls, they have to ensure that their customer service representatives fully understand the range of issues facing their customers, as well as giving them the ability to drill down into customer networks and anticipate problems before they occur. Providing assets that enable video quality monitoring – especially important for video over IP networks – Accenture gives operators the capabilities they need to monitor, manage and secure their offering deeper into customers’ home environments.
  
  
• Anticipating Service Delivery Platform and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) deployment: To provide them with the agility and responsiveness they need in a converged market environment, many operators are moving toward standardized next-generation networking architectures. The Service Delivery Platform and IMS, which provide them with a common set of functions and a common way of viewing the underlying network, are key operational aspects for enabling this migration. All the assets we provide are pre-integrated with our renowned Service Delivery Platform, ensuring that operators are aligned with this strategic imperative from the outset, accelerating time to market and ensuring that they can maintain a consistently assertive position in the value chain for delivery of convergent solutions.
  
  
• Analyzing customer behavior: Operators need to know what their customers are doing, and when. This is essential for achieving differentiation, as well as for planning how best to grow/develop service offerings. Our IPTV solutions enable operators to understand customer behavior and leverage that information to achieve business advantage. Using this end-to-end solution, operators can obtain vital marketing material from their customers, gaining insights into their recording/viewing habits, identifying common trends and usage models and feeding that information through to marketing. Fully integrated platforms ensure that targeted advertising is delivered to individual segments and bandwidth availability can be planned to coincide with peak usage.
  
  
• Integrating the billing function: To run an IPTV service, operators must make fundamental changes to the billing function. Instead of handling a relatively predictable range of factors, billing capabilities will need to capture large numbers of micro-transactions, integrating bills across multiple services, multiple packages, services and payment methods, as well as settlement with a large number of partners. Billing will also need to be integrated with pricing and promotions. Accenture Communications Solutions featuring IPTV provides operators with access to comprehensive, real-time information on customer accounts, enabling queries to be settled accurately and quickly. Its flexibility allows different pricing models to be applied to customers fulfilling different customer needs, as well as providing for the rapid introduction of new value-added products and services requiring real-time billing support and third-party integration.