Smart Digivision Weaves Effective Billing Into IPTV Services With SunTec Soln

Remember the revolution called cable TV that brought about the migration from ‘Buniyad’ to ‘Hum Paanch’. Following the liberalisation of the broadcast industry in the country in the early 90s, cable TV became a synonym to TV services. However, with new technologies coming into play, its monopoly has been threatened like never before. We take a look at one of the competitors of cable TV – IPTV – and see how a service provider in the IPTV space is using technology to deliver a superior customer experience. With technology at its beck and call, Smart Digivision is quickly finding its way into the favourite dinner time activity of Indian citizens.

Smart TV Group, comprising Smart Broadband Services and Smart Digivision, was founded in 2007, with the purpose of undertaking Interactive Video (IPTV) Services. They entered into long-term contracts with MTNL and BSNL for providing co-branded, interactive video services to their customers in 54 large cities across the country. The company launched its IPTV services under the MyWay brand and its offerings include Internet-enabled interactive services, content on-demand and personalised TV.

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“Cable TV had already made inroads into the lives of all the people in India. It was a challenge to gauge the perception of the masses and their acceptance of this latest technology,” says Kapil Dev Kumar, COO, MyWay, Smart Digivision. Along with this, the competition faced from DTH providers, who were again catering to the urban market, was also a challenge.

‘Something extra always attracts more customers’. Many businesses have found their success in this mantra and Smart Digivision thought of following suit. “To stay ahead of competition and also to roll out dynamic, value-added services and product-bundling options to attract more usage and consumers, we opted for a convergent billing platform that would enable us to charge and manage customer balances effectively,” says Kumar.

Enter SunTec with its TBMS-T, which provided a convergent transaction pricing and billing platform to Smart Digivision. The plan was to bill customers in prepaid and postpaid models. Apart from charging and managing customer balances, they also required the billing system to be able to handle complex revenue sharing business rules and settlement with IPTV service carriers and content aggregators/ providers.

SunTec’s billing system was installed as a single solution that supports pricing and billing of the company’s prepaid and postpaid customers, besides supporting various revenue sharing models for content providers, aggregators and network partners.

TBMS-T handles provisioning/ de-provisioning of services on the SeaChange middleware platform, extracts usage records and events from the middleware for rating and billing, defines the product catalogue and calculates usage charges, and finally generates bills including non-usage charges for Smart Digivision.

Challenges

As we all know, no success is complete or sweet without its set of challenges. In this case, the biggest challenge was that the entire set-up was a first-time experiment for all stakeholders involved. “SunTec’s billing system had to integrate with our middleware deployed by SeaChange International to offer MyWay the capability to automate provisioning of IPTV consumers and accounts in ’near real time’”, says Kumar.

SeaChange also was implementing middleware for the fist time for an IPTV service provider. SunTec’s solution TBMS-T interfaces in near real time with SeaChange’s TV Navigator middleware, electronic program guide, video-on-demand systems and set-top box applications. “With so many first times, we were worried about the success of the project,” says Kumar.

Says K Nanda Kumar, CEO, SunTec, “It was for the first time that SunTec was deploying its billing solution for an IPTV service provider. We had to support the creation of highly flexible bundles and packages, and very sophisticated practices like cross-product discounting. More over, we had to do sophisticated settlement with all their content as well as network partners. Features like TV UI-based self-care facilities, prepaid voucher management, etc, were new for us”.

However, Nanda Kumar feels that the clarity on requirements from the Smart Digivision team helped SunTec to turn around the implementation in a remarkably short time period.

Benefits

The entire existence of business models is based on this one word called ‘benefits’ or ‘returns’. So what were the benefits derived by Smart Digivision post deployment of this solution? For one, the various modules of SunTec’s product enabled the creation, management and maintenance of subscriptions, effortless daily billing for prepaid customers, the collection of payments and settlement to content providers based on the number of subscribers, who have actually viewed the channels. Generation of reports for MIS and analysis and easy interfacing with other in-house systems were the other business objectives met by TBMS-T.

“TBMS-T helped us in the facilitation of sophisticated self-care options for customers, through the TV UI, the creation and maintenance of e-wallet/ electronic voucher management system for prepaid customers, the ability to support online payments via payment gateways like ICICI, Bill Desk etc,” says Kumar.

He further adds that the implementation of TBMS-T enabled them with a better customer/ subscription set-up process; it also reduced time-to-market for new products and value-added services. It also helped in a centralised billing system for the entire service bouquet along with a streamlined and automated customer activation and management process and better control over operations in all centres. “Our customers are very happy with the quality of services and bundling packages introduced in the market. Techno-savvy people are highly appreciative of the services offered,” adds Kumar.

For SunTec, they had a very valuable learning in creating sophisticated bundling of broadcast as well as non-broadcast content, real-time prepaid balance and voucher management, TV UI-based self-care facilities etc, according to Nanda Kumar.

Conclusion

Talking about the future of IPTV in the country, Nanda Kumar says, “IPTV enables the convergence of video, data and broadcast on your TV screen. IPTV has the potential to change the way TV has been perceived. There is immense potential for innovation in this space”.

According to him, a noble example of this is the concept of custom targeted advertising, where each subscriber sees different advertisements according to their preferences and the target segment they belong to.

With customisation being the buzzword in the market today, it seems like Smart Digivision has hit the right keys for success in an otherwise crowded space.