OTT Service Activation using Platform as a Service model for CSPs

Background

The booming popularity and proliferation of streaming services will drive an almost doubling of global OTT revenue across the major markets in US, UK, EU, Asia, India, etc. Global OTT market is driven by Subscription VOD and Transaction (digital renting and buying) VOD services laid by CSPs and as well as OTT Players across the markets along with Live TV services. OTT video growth is coming from both inside and outside the home as Internet-connected devices proliferate and also high speed broadband and mobile services are enabling its rapid adoption by the consumers. The next generation of connectivity i.e High Speed fibre broadband (FTTx) and 5G mobile services has been started to roll out in fast pace in many markets, which will significantly drive OTT video use in many folds across the geographies. Many OTT services have seen surge in new subscribers as consumers across the world are forced to stay at home due to Covid lockdowns since second half of 2020. Consumers are adapting to the new normal (Work From Home, School/Tuition From Home, Services from Home, etc) which has introduced change in habits especially in entertainment space such as watching more personalized content on personalized screens rather than common living room screens. So, Entertainment at Home has taken a new dimension altogether and therefore brought new opportunities to be monetized by CSPs partnered with OTT players.

CSPs are coming up with innovative and cost effective product models so that they can retain the customers and as well as reduce the churn using this new OTT dimension. This also means CSPs have to enter into mutual agreements with as many OTT players as possible so that content from various broadcasters and content producers will be available easily for the consumers with one subscription and one bill. Consumers will prefer to choose the broadband and mobile services from CSPs whoever is providing greater and variety of content for TV viewing at home. So, Content Aggregation becomes the popular monetization model for CSPs to increase revenue and achieve the profit margins eventually. This makes a win-win for CSPs and as well as OTT Players where the CSPs can leverage the advantage of broad range of Content availability for their consumers from various OTT Players while OTT Players can increase the revenue with increased subscriber base by partnering with as many CSPs as possible in existing and as well as new markets easily.

Introduction

In order to aggregate content from various OTT Players, CSPs have to integrate with respective OTT Player systems from service provisioning to service delivery. In general, following key functions would be relevant for any CSP in order to onboard any OTT Player.

• Service Provisioning: For many CSPs, Service Provisioning will be unique and bespoke as per their BSS eco-system, associated business processes, subscription/package models, customer management and sales channels.
• Service Activation: Service Activation is the process where the CSP have to enable the end consumer to register and activate their profile in respective OTT Player App so that OTT Player will onboard the respective CSP customer on their platform and enable the service delivery. Largely the process and steps of on-boarding the end consumer will be same with all OTT Players.
• Service Delivery: OTT Players and CSPs will enable the end customer to consume the content on different device platforms as per the mutually agreed service delivery model. OTT Player will play predominant role but at the same time if CSPs have any unique delivery mechanism then it requires bespoke implementation by both CSP and OTT Player in order to integrate the service delivery chain.

As stated Service Provisioning and Service Delivery will be unique and bespoke to each CSP as per their BSS and OSS processes, applications and enterprise level integrations. Whereas Service Activation will be more or less same across all OTT Players and CSPs as everyone wants to have a simple and smooth process to onboard the customer for the respective OTT Player App. Service Activation is the phase where the end customer is involved directly to perform few actions and steps within the respective OTT Player App in order to activate their service on the allowed device platforms after their order is completed by CSP. Hence CSPs will not be willing to have a process that is unique and different to onboard their customers with each OTT Player. OTT Players will also be interested to have a unified and same process to onboard the customers in their App irrespective of the CSP. So, the integration between CSPs and OTT Players for Service Activation phase will be reusable like plug-n-play and therefore a Platform as a Service model will create huge simplicity, cost optimization and most importantly reduce Time To Market drastically. It also enables CSPs to monitor and resolve any technical or integration issues quickly and easily with different OTT Players while onboarding the customers. At the same time, it becomes easy as well to disembark and remove integration with any OTT Player when the mutual agreement elapses.

Challenges for CSPs

There are good number of challenges that CSPs struggling to resolve when it comes to OTT Service Activation.

• Major OTT Players will dictate the integration pattern that is easy to operate for them eventhough it may not give flexibility for every associated CSP.
• CSPs in popular regions have to integrate with many OTT Players and the business team will get into mutual agreement with each OTT Player at different timelines based on market conditions, popularity and content availability. This means the Technology team have to handle the integrations with each OTT Player at different timelines which will be like a new project altogether everytime.
• In many cases, a new OTT Player integration for CSPs will introduce fresh resourcing challenge, delivery and operations complexity, knowledge gap, incur additional cost of solution and most importantly it will take complete cycle time. So, if a CSP have to integrate with 10 OTT Players then it requires 10x cost, 10x effort, 10x time and 10x complexity as every integration will be treated as a separate project on its own.
• It becomes another project and hence all associated cost, time and effort when CSP wants to disassociate and close the contract with any OTT Player
• CSP’s technology team will be spending 80% of their time in design and collaboration and the Integration will never be smooth due to differences in work culture, practices and people dynamics between the organizations of CSP and OTT Player. It will be frustrating especially when Technology team have to engage with multiple OTT Player teams each time for every project.
• Technology Team will not have chance to come up with strategic solutions and always be under the pressure to deliver tactical solutions to meet the demands of business and timelines with every OTT player aggregation project. This will inturn increase the technical debt or backlog which will never be funded and allowed for Technology team to work on.

Problem Statement

CSPs have to come up with strategic and simple mechanisms in order to reduce the time to market, cost of integration and overall complexity when there are multiple OTT Players. Reusability and simplicity should be the primary objective for CSPs so that the experience will be smooth and simple for the customers while they are on-boarded or activated on the respective OTT Player App or CSP Platform for Service Activation. Service Provisioning and Delivery will be unique and bespoke implementation whereas CSPs can easily come up with solutions for Service Activation to template and reuse for different OTT Players. The solution for Service Activation can also be built as a template and customized for different CSPs and OTT Players by the IT/SI vendors of CSPs easily so that they can help CSPs to reduce time to market and cost of solution.

Solution

A simple Platform as a Service model can be implemented as a strategic solution to make Service Activation as a template and reuse it for multiple OTT Players. CSPs can build it once and use it as-is or customize it for various OTT Player integrations as required.

Application Architecture

The description of the steps mentioned in the above diagram:

• 1) When Customer orders for respective OTT subscription, CSP’s BSS provisioning ecosystem will handle the request as per the relevant subscription/package model and other business and customer management processes
• 2) As part of the BSS order management and provisioning workflow, concerned BSS system will trigger a mediation request to the respective CSP’s mediation platform (Eg. Enterprise Service Broker) which in turn delegates that request to Entitlement Provision endpoint
• 3) Customer will be communicated with a link to their email/communication preference channel. The link will redirect the customer to the respective OTT Player App where the customer will perform few actions to get registered and authorized with OTT Player.
• 4) Customer will provide the necessary details (eg. customerId, email, activation code, etc) in OTT Player App as provided by CSP to get authorized with OTT Player system as part of the on-boarding process.
• 5) OTT App will send the request to its backend system with details provided by the CSP customer
• 6) OTT Player backend will authenticate and authorize the customer by sending Register request to CSP’s Entitlement Management endpoint.
• 7) OTT Player backend system will cache the entitlement information that it will receive from CSP for a period of time as per the mutually agreed policies and it will on-board the customer successfully if the customer is authorized by CSP and customer has valid entitlements.
• 8) OTT Player backend will periodically validates the entitlement information of the customers with the CSP so that customers will be allowed or rejected to consume the service appropriately. There can be a push mechanism where CSP can notify to OTT Player if there is any change in the status of subscription or account of the customer that will affect the entitlements of the customer to consume the service in respective OTT Player App

As explained above the steps of on-boarding, authentication and authorization and entitlement validation of the end customer of CSP will be same more or less with any OTT Player. The difference could be in terms of authorization rules, entitlement cache period, validation policy, real time or periodic entitlement validation, etc. which will not require major solution development each time for CSP while introducing a new OTT Player association.

Platform as a Service

As the solution for OTT Service Activation will be same for all OTT Players, CSPs can leverage the advantages of Platform as a Service approach so that the solution can be built once but reused or customized for multiple OTT Players at different timelines as per the business demand. Also the experience for the end customer will be same, persistent and simple with all OTT Player service activation that CSP will launch within its portfolio.

The workflow required for Service Activation can be built with few microservices and APIs and they can be built and run in Cloud or Cloud Native Onpremise environments. That way application can distributed easily with fault tolerance and as well as scaled up or down for performance as per the SLAs in agreement with OTT Player.

As the core workflow will be same for all OTT Players, it can be created as a template so that customization will not require considerable effort and time when business wants to introduce new OTT Player integration. Most of the cases, it would be merely increasing the availability, spinning up additional microservice containers, scaling up or down the resources for the containers as per performance SLAs, introducing additional or new rules for API authentication and authorization. None of those require additional development except the API levle configurations and Infrastructure resource alterations.

Benefits to CSP with PaaS model

• CapEx and OpEx can be instantly managed effectively with a Pay-as-you-Go model using PaaS approach
• When business wants to disassociate with any OTT Player, then it will be easy to turn off the capabilities and scale down the resources so that the OpEx will saved instantly
• When Business wants to introduce a new OTT Player integration then it will be simple and any customization will not require much effort and time. So, the time to market, effort and time will be very less to enable service activation. It will be just a matter of scaling up of the resources and few customization in the APIs/Microservices as required
• Infrastructure resource optimization can be achieved as its easy to enable the workflow for new OTT Player and Technology team need not to invest heavily and over provision the infrastructure initially itself.

Conclusion

As per the dynamic market conditions and consumer demand for OTT content, more and more CSPs across the geographies are taking up Content Aggregation strategies so that they can associate with as many OTT Players as possible to provide better customer experience, reduce churn and increase customer retention. Inline with that CSPs have to adopt modern and strategic technology objectives in order to optimize the cost of solution, reduce the time to market and provide greater experience to end customers with simple and unified processes across all OTT services. Using PaaS model for OTT Service Activation phase as explained in this article, CSPs can achieve those strategic objectives very easily and also obtain business benefits as well.