Telecom engineers, software people, strategy experts, finance guys, customer service folks and general office workers - that has been the typical line-up of people running a telecommunications business. As a network-centric business that focused solely on supplying connectivity, a Mobile Network Operators(MNO)' operations have always revolved around maintaining their networks and ensuring that subscribers can continuously make calls, send messages and access the Internet, anytime of the day.
The MNO's role still centers on communications and Internet connectivity services, but the kind of expertise and competencies it carries today have become so highly diversified, and anyone who works in an MNO will say that half of the departments that some MNOs run at present have hardly anything to do with the telecom industry.
The reason for this is obvious. Unlike utilities such as electricity and water companies, digital content, which is what MNOs actually deliver when they connect people to mobile Internet, turns out to be an untapped goldmine in itself. While electricity and water are the classics of a perfect competition market where every unit of the product is completely homogeneous, broadband connectivity comes not only in variations of speed and quality, but differs wildly in terms of the actual content delivered to users.
It used to be that one receives 10 megabytes of data just like one receives 25 cubic metres of water or 900 kilowatts of electricity. However, today, while water and electricity are accounted pretty much the same way (no one says I consumed 200 hours of refrigeration, 300 hours of airconditioning or 50 hours of warm baths), mobile customers are saying that they have watched 20 movies on Netflix, downloaded 17 music albums on Rhapsody, Facebooked for 20 hours, Whatsapped 30 people during the day and spent 2 hours online shopping on Amazon.com.
Content bundling which debuted about 4 years ago with Facebook and Twitter minutes bundled into data plans started accustomizing users to the idea of consuming not bytes, but a specific service that involved the use or access to digital content. These services have since proliferated into an endless array of activities including calling, video calling, messaging, video streaming, music streaming, reading, conferencing, shopping and booking and paying for an infinite number of goods and services. And surfing the web, which was what mobile data was all about when it was first offered, is now relegated to somewhere at the end of the list in most mobile data bundles.
MNOs realized that the meteoric rise in the consumption of mobile content especially among those who are young, who have enough cash allocation to be spent on their mobile devices, and the evolution in technology that enables multi-screen, IP-based, over-the-top(OTT) content to be delivered to virtually anyone anywhere in the world, will require them to go beyond offering bytes-denominated plans, to plans which are content defined. A plan that provides 3 hours of access to a Mobile TV apps that boasts 6 channels for example, can be offered as a standalone service, upon which voice and messaging can be added onto. After all, OTT TV providers such as Netflix and HBO Go, cable TV Operators and IPTV providers have been bundling content with connectivity, and packages on OTT TV can start for as low as US$10 and that's for a market that promises revenues of US$31.6 billion by 2019, according to Juniper Research. It's not surprising that MNOs are now moving towards the same direction, and are developing their own digital content malls where one can pick from hundreds of content subscriptions all bundled with connectivity, enjoy these on their devices and on their TV sets or any other connected screen, and never say anything about the traditional data plans anymore.
MNOs are thus expected to start developing their own digital content departments - not to produce movies or so, though there is no discounting the possibility of that happening somewhere in the distant future (check out Telstra's Telstra Media which publishes top stories from a number of popular sources), assembling the right teams and building in-house capabilities to acquire, manage and deliver a wide range of digital content on mobile.
Verizon Wireless, US's biggest mobile Operator recently announced a new content partnership, this time with VICE, a provider of award-winning content for the youth market. The partnership will see VICE's content being offered on Verizon's mobile video platform, slated to be launched later this year. The multi-year partnership, said the Operator, will include original domestic and international programming produced exclusively for Verizon via a mobile-first video offering.
As with any content partnership, content curation will play a big role in ensuring that the collection of content that is offered is aligned to the MNO's subscriber base. With the Verizon-VICE partnership, Verizon will be choosing a selection of original videos from across VICE's digital channels covering a range of categories, from cultural stories to food, travel, tech and more.
As such partnerships become commonplace and pick up pace with more MNOs making foray into the digital content market, MNOs will have some serious reskilling to consider. Take the case of Verizon-VICE - someone had to hunt the market for content. Someone must have the expertise to judge what will sell, and whether it will sell well as a mobile offering. Verizon Wireless said that VICE original interview series "Autobiographies" will headline the collaboration, anticipating a huge take-up on such content genre which captures the lives of society's successful and well-known personas.
In addition to this, someone must curate all the content - documentaries, shows, live telecasts, movies etc. to create a winning combination for the perfect daily line-up. Someone must engineer the delivery - from the video platform to the content delivery networks to optimization to ensure uninterrupted viewing experience, even during congestion times. Someone must be able to assess the user experience, and tie that with user ratings and correlate that further with the choice of content that is being sent down the pipe.
In a nutshell, MNOs have a lot of new capabilities to be pulled together and it is obvious that a completely different pool of people will start shaping up the new MNOs as they transform into Digital Telcos. Meanwhile, for those with great skills in all forms of digital content - as producers and publishers, as directors and artists, as aggregators and curators - partnerships with major MNOs will pave the way for their talent and capabilities to be showcased across every connected screen worldwide.
