“It’s clear that operators want to support standardization and industry-wide initiatives, but they also need to create competitive advantage from their OTT partnerships. That means they need to offer more value than other operators, and they need to be easier to work with,” said Dr Andy Tiller, vice president of product marketing for AsiaInfo. O²P facilitates the creation and development of ‘converged’ or ‘mash-up’ products, which consist of the operator’s services (mobile data, QoS, charging etc.) and OTT services (e.g. music streaming, VoD etc.). The open platform becomes an API hub for connecting the IT systems of operators and other Digital Service Providers (DSPs).
“Many operators work with a handful of OTT partners today – for example a preferred music partner such as Spotify, Deezer or Wimp. But creating an attractive overall package which combines the partner’s service with operator value adds – such as a special tariff, QoS and charge-to-bill – generally involves manual customization of the BSS systems, which is expensive and not scalable to a large number of partnerships,” said Dr Tiller, for AsiaInfo.
