Accenture Communications & High Tech Solutions
Bringing the Three Screens to Life
A vision for high performance in a
convergent world
We live in a three-screen
world—interacting with our
televisions, computers and
mobile devices—and consumers
will increasingly expect content
to flow seamlessly across all
three. A host of technology and
business hurdles stand in the
way of realizing that vision
however, and players across the
digital ecosystem will be vying
to solve those challenges as
quickly as possible to seize the
lucrative "first screen" to the
consumer—whichever screen
provides a person's dominant
entry point into the digital
world.
Mobile providers and device
manu-facturers stand in a
particularly influential position,
as one thing cannot be disputed:
consumers probably do not have
their TVs with them all the time;
they may or may not have their
computers with them; but they
probably do have their mobile
phones close at hand. If
wireless providers can solve
the technical, business and
operational challenges ahead,
they have a chance to thrive in
a three-screen world.
Bringing the three delivery environment. These include have dramatically altered consumer
service delivery platforms, network habits and expectations, giving them
screens to life requires a
architectures, service quality manage- more control over when and how they
compelling vision of what ment, digital rights management, cus- watch video.
high performance looks tomer analytics, handset testing, fault
like. And it also requires a management and a host of other tech- The next phase of this trend is likely
clear roadmap that nology and business process compo- to be video-on-demand, with large
nents that have to be in place before a libraries of video stored on the net-
can make achieving high football is actually going to fly across work. Time-independence will then be
performance a realistic a TV to a PC and a mobile phone. augmented by locationindependence.
possibility. Offerings such as Slingbox already let
Bringing the three screens to life consumers watch television, including
requires a compelling vision of what their DVR programming, anywhere
One of the more compelling visions of
high performance looks like in the dig- from a compatible computer or mobile
how consumers are likely to access
ital age. And it also requires a clear phone equipped with an Internet
digital media, entertainment and com-
roadmap that can make achieving high connection.
munications in the future was demon-
performance a realistic possibility.
strated in a recent television commer-
Accenture research has shown that
cial from AT&T as part of its "three
A number of important consumer and consumers are ready for these
screens" advertising campaign. In the
technology changes are occurring innovations. The Accenture Digital
ad, a camera pans across crowded
across the consumption, distribution Home Global Consumer Study found,
rooms both in homes and in pubs,
and production of video and other for example, that 69 percent of those
showing different groups of people
digital content that every industry polled want to download and watch
watching a live American football
player needs to be aware of. video on their TV; an almost identical
game simultaneously on a large
number (68 percent) indicated interest
television screen, a laptop computer
Consumer trends in downloading and watching video
and a mobile phone. "Three screens—
First, consumers are realizing that they over the Internet, with 38 percent
wireless, broadband and TV—are com-
can have much greater control and having already done so. Location-
ing together," says the voiceover.
choice over what media content they independence and mobility are also
can access, as well as when and where capabilities they're interested in: 51
Yes, the advertisement takes some
they access it. They are also beginning percent want to watch local TV when
liberties with reality (at least current
to grow accustomed to the possibili- they are away from home,
reality), but it does an admirable job of
ties of the Web 2.0 world—creating and 40 percent are interested in
bringing an important idea to life: the
and sharing their own content in addi- watching video on their cell phones.
ability to watch video or access other
tion to accessing someone else's.
digital content, and personal account
Second, several new methods of The move to user-generated content is
information seamlessly as we move
distributing digital content, especially another important consumer trend.
from home to work to car and then
video, are gaining mainstream accep- Creating and sharing photos was the
out for an evening's entertainment.
tance. Third, video producers are first phase of this trend and now, with
responding to and shaping these better cameras and production equip-
Unlike some futuristic visions, the idea
trends by adapting their production ment, video distribution by consumers
of seamless delivery of content across
and creative processes to deal with the is also growing rapidly. These videos
the three most popular consumer
threats and opportunities posed by are finding their way to other areas of
media devices is not entirely far-
these new technologies and social the Internet through mashups and
fetched. Indeed, it's a strategy that
trends. other sites, and they're also making
communications, hightech and media
their way to mobile phones.
companies (AT&T among them) are
Looking first at consumer trends, the
actively pursuing in an age of
media and entertainment world is Distribution trends
convergence.
rapidly moving away from the The first thing to note with regard to
traditional idea that TV schedules dic- distribution is that the Internet has
Actually delivering that seamless
tate viewing times and behaviors. become faster and more reliable, so
consumer experience across three
Already, studies have shown that less using it as a means of distributing
screens, however, involves expertise
than ten percent of TV content is video has finally become feasible.
and innovation across a number of
actually watched at the moment it's Improvements in the basic network
domains that sound less exciting, but
being broadcast by a network. Digital infrastructure have allowed the
are the essential building blocks of an
Video Recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo telecommunications companies to
end-to-end service creation and
and some of the newer HDTV recorders enter the video market; today, most

2 Accenture Communications & High Tech Solutions

telcos have some sort of IPTV offering
either launched or in an advanced
development stage.
Other companies are springing up that
make use of the Internet connections
provided by the telcos to provide video
"over the top" of these connections, as
the industry phrase has it. CinemaNow
and Movielink, for example, offer
downloadable movies, TV shows and
other video for rent or purchase. A
range of other media owners and
broadcasters are also using this new
medium to complement their existing
distribution channels.
At the same time, an increasing num-
ber of 3G and 4G broadband deploy-
ments, and technologies such as
Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld
(DVB-H), are enabling video distribu-
tion to mobile handsets. As the mobile
devices increase in processing power
and improve their screen resolution,
mobile video is poised to become a
force in the marketplace.
Business and market trends
From a business point of view, the
move by telcos and other companies
into the world of three-screen digital
content is part of a broader strategy to
diversify and grow new revenue
streams. Offering compelling content
independent of location or particular
device is a means of generating
growth through additional services—
either directly from customer revenues
or from associated advertising income.
Frankly, one reason for creating a
compelling marketing and television
advertising campaign is to let con-
sumers see the possibilities of the
threescreens world, and give them an
impetus to purchase higher-speed,
higher-cost broadband speeds and
wireless packages.
The possibility of using a three-screen
strategy to reduce customer churn and
increase retention is also an increas-
ingly important part of the overall
business case for development. If one
can provide an attractive bundle of
services at the right price across the
three primary consumer devices, and
deliver a high-quality experience
across all three, a company has the
chance to lock that customer in for a
longer period, either through creating
a positive reason to stay or by pre-
senting a disagreeable impediment to
bolting to a competitor.
From a competitive point of view, the
telcos moving into the three-screen
space are doing so to recapture the
value of their "pipes" that is being
siphoned away by the over-the-top
companies—the media and Internet
players using the telco networks.
The "dumb pipes" problem, as it is
sometimes called, may sometimes be
overstated. In a recent interview with
Accenture, Atish Gude, senior vice
president for Sprint Nextel’s WiMAX
business operations, noted that the
idea of dumb access “was invented by
people sitting in Silicon Valley who
were jealous that they didn’t have the
access." Companies like Sprint Nextel
actually make a lot of money on that
access, Gude says. "There are a lot of
companies coming to us now saying,
‘Can I have your location information?
Can I have security? Can I have your
device management? Can you bill on
that?’ Now we don’t look so dumb.
And, by the way, there’s a charge for
those services.”
The traditional telcos have a lot of
advantages in the three-screen world,
after all. They have the networks, the
billing systems, the customer care
infrastructure, and so on, that will
continue to make them a formidable
force. Nevertheless, wireless and wire-
line companies alike need to be think-
ing about multiple kinds of revenue
models if they are to sustain high
performance in the long term.
As we noted, transforming the vision
of three screens into reality presents
some formidable challenges. The fol-
lowing are perhaps the most critical of
these potential obstacles.
Technology and integration
challenges
The technology components that make
a three-screen strategy work are not
only new and often unproven, but also
come from multiple providers. The
middleware products to support
complex video solutions are relatively
immature and unstable. That makes
integration of these technologies into
an end-to-end solution highly
complex. Content acquisition and
distribution is another obstacle. The
workflows for content ingestion,
transcoding and distribution are
difficult, and considerable debate is
currently taking place over what
codecs to use for content encoding.
Many of the codecs are proprietary,
which can alter any given technology
solution significantly. Most digital
rights management (DRM) solutions
are also proprietary, so picking the
rights one that supports a company's
business requirements at the right
price point is often a complex matter.
A significant number of content
distribution challenges also exist. The
current communications and content
environment is generally characterized
by extremely inefficient distribution.
Companies generally send the same
content over the same pipes multiple
times. And no effective hierarchical
content delivery network has really
been devised yet.
Creating a stable and scalable video
service over a broadband multi-service
platform is a big looming issue when
it comes to video distribution across
multiple screens. The bandwidth and
quality of service needed for real-time
distribution of content across the
three screens also lag in terms of
maturity and stability. So even where
the pipes themselves are big enough,
the quality of service capabilities may
not be able to support streaming
video. One of the cardinal rules of
video distribution is that the quality
perceived by a consumer has to at
least equal a traditional viewing
experience. But that is a huge
challenge. All the network and service
Bringing the Three Screens to Life 3
control issues required for quality of
service and bandwidth control
between the different services over the
same broadband access requires signif-
icant engineering know-how as well as
understanding of multiple broadband
services and their characteristics. The
architecture that enables the video
service must also be stable over the
access network and home access
gateway using IP. This is not a trivial
matter; design of such an architecture
requires unique understanding of video
as well as broadband. An industry
issue that compounds the quality of
service problem is peer-to-peer net-
working, which eats up bandwidth and
crowds out other Internet applications.
The issue of technology standards
arises when you're talking about
moving content to multiple screens
and devices. And content rendering
becomes a real challenge given the
proliferation of mobile devices. It's
difficult right now to port a rich media
client to figure out the right rendering
on multiple screens.
Finally, in an era where you have a
proliferation of both professionally
produced media and user-generated
content, the industry will need very
robust search engines to help users
find the content they really want. The
field of "metadata management,"
therefore, is going to grow in impor-
tance—the categories by which con-
tent is organized, stored and retrieved.
Some sort of standardization of
metadata will be necessary, and that
includes not only content metadata,
but community metadata as well. That
is, there may be 15,000 hits for a video
search, but how many are appropriate
for an 8-year-old child? All these
details need to be worked out before
consumers will have a sufficient
degree of trust and confidence in the
three-screen distribution channel.
Operational challenges
From an operational perspective,
the threescreen world will present
challenges in several areas. Equipping
a field force for more complex instal-
lation and repair calls, for example,
4 Accenture Communications & High Tech Solutions
will be important, as will areas such as
configuration management—every-
thing from providing the organizations,
processes and systems to managing
the home network that is critical for
the distribution of that content within
the home.
Training and supporting a customer
contact staff to deal with new three-
screen products and services will also
be an obstacle. Ordering, provisioning
and service will be more difficult for
companies used primarily to broad-
band and voice services. With many
video implementations today we're
already seeing quite a bit of ordering
fallout. If companies want to avoid
customer experience problems, they
need to streamline their service fulfill-
ment processes. And if they are to
avoid revenue leakage, they need to
increase their ability to deal with
much more complex billing relation-
ships in an environment where multi-
ple parties come together to create a
single consumer service.
The challenges to successfully bringing
the three screens to life are multiple
and, therefore, so are the solutions.
But here are some of the most impor-
tant considerations when thinking
about driving high performance in a
convergent era through delivering
compelling services across the most
popular consumer devices.
Capture the first screen
Mobile service providers and device
manufacturers have a distinct
opportunity to seize the "first screen"
advantage—the screen that a
consumer feels is the primary portal
into the digital world. Consider the
fact that, on average, users spend a
higher percentage of time with an
“always on“ mobile phone than they
do with a computer or television.
Capturing the first screen—that is,
making the use of a mobile phone a
habit when it comes to accessing the
Internet and data services—is an effec-
tive way to make money through
usage as well as through advertising.
Today it is increasingly important
to create business models based on
usage, not number of users. No one is
going to own the entire user base any
more. But if you can be the dominant
screen, you will drive increased use of
data services. So competitive advan-
tage must be built on the innovative
services that drive higher usage from
consumers.
Enable more collaborative and
faster service innovation and
delivery
The complexity of the three-screen
environment means that no single
service provider can provide, on its
own, all the capabilities needed to
drive high performance. Although the
industry is witnessing a massive land-
grab at the moment, with revenue
sharing between players in the value
chain remaining a huge issue, success-
ful players will be those that can
develop the right long term partner-
ships and collaborative tools. Such
collaboration will create a foundation
on which to build a digital ecosystem.
Companies must take a broader and
more integrated approach to new-
service development, one based on a
standardized or "factory" environment.
Just as factories and assembly lines in
the industrial era transformed manu-
facturing into a more predictable,
cheaper and less financially risky
operation, a factory approach can
create an environment for more
effective service innovation, develop-
ment and operations in the IP era.
More effective service delivery
platforms are one critical piece of the
overall solution for a service factory.
Yet other pieces are equally important:
using a mix of dedicated offshore and
onshore resources to help take new
services from ideas through launch
more cost effectively; building upon
pre-built services from a proven
catalog; creating a more effective
capability for third-party collaboration;
and using a hosted capability to
support more effective and efficient
management and optimization of
services over time.
Adapt your service delivery
platform to a Web 2.0
environment
A three-screen delivery environment
has outpaced the ability of traditional
service delivery platforms to keep up.
As services involve increasing numbers
of third parties working together, and
as the platforms cross devices and
technology infrastructures, service
delivery platforms must evolve
accordingly.
With what Accenture calls, "SDP 2.0"
capabilities, a service delivery platform
continues to provide its traditional
value—support for dynamic, flexible
creation of end-user services that run
over networks, consistent provision of
services to end-users and the controls
over the execution of those services to
make them cost effective.
To those basic services, however, SDP
2.0 adds vital new capabilities such as
onboarding, unified user information,
flexible policy management, full
service management and control, and
open service creation environment. It
also enables things such as mashups,
mobile widgets, application presence,
network presence, location-based
services and so forth. Other critical
supporting features of SDP 2.0 are:
• Third-party gateway, to expose Web
services to the community of
developers in a secure and
policycontrolled way.
• Third-party on-boarding capabilities,
to manage the service creation
process and operations.
• Service enabler exposure to expand
the 2.0 partner ecosystem, enabling
the mashup of network-specific
capabilities such as location and
presence with other services from
multiple external providers.
• Support for the end-to-end process:
qualification, on-boarding,
validation and deployment of final
users.
• Support for different operating and
business models with third parties.
Think "service quality
management," not "fault
management"
In the pursuit of providing a quality
service experience to customers, the
mentality of most operators has tradi-
tionally been on fault management—
the detection and correction of
malfunctions in the network. But
several leading companies such as
Telecom Italia have been successful in
taking fault management to the next
level and developing more of a service
quality management mentality.
Service quality management builds on
existing network fault management
and alarms to provide things such as
rootcause analysis and determination
of impact on services. It also should
include a robust trouble management
infrastructure that enables a provider
to comprehensively track network
outages, report on their nature and
impact, and then restore services.
Trouble management capabilities
should also enable proper dispatch and
workforce alignment to the company’s
operational issues.
Develop a powerful customer
portal to improve the customer
experience
Essential to creating differentiated and
customer-centric capabilities is the
customer portal—multi-channel
applications that enable the creation,
sharing and distribution of personal-
ized content, as well as access to
self-service capabilities. Portals
provide broad functionality for success
in the Web 2.0 world, where cus-
tomers use web functionality to
participate in social networks, create
and share content, and receive
personalized services, in addition to
traditional communications services
based on fixed-mobile convergence.
Service providers must deliver a
seamless experience to customers
accessing services from any device-
oriented portal—a PC, an IPTV-enabled
television or mobile phone. We believe
that carriers, especially mobile carriers,
must create a two-fold portal strategy:
combining so-called “in-portal”
and “off-portal” propositions to access
content and communications services.
Inportal propositions grant users
access to dedicated content and
communications services controlled by
the carrier—delivered through the “idle
screen” or the first screen a user sees
on a mobile device. The offportal
proposition simply opens up the
gates to the outside world of the
Internet, where control of what a
customer does or buys would instead
be shared by service providers who
provide access to final services such as
Amazon, Google and You Tube.
Develop capabilities for
integrated, end-to-end device
and service testing
To deliver a superior customer
experience given the proliferation
of the numbers and types of mobile
handsets, wireless service providers
must ensure the new devices
operate flawlessly both before
shipment and after delivery. But
routine test coverage and drive testing
is not enough with these multimedia
phones.
The advanced operating systems and
applications require wireless service
providers to perform even more test
cases, with a limited set of internal
resources. Adding to the difficulty,
after shipping the multimedia hand-
sets, wireless service providers are
finding the devices generate more
handset software and firmware
errors. According to Accenture
analysis, newly released devices suffer
from an average 30 percent fault rate.
Software faults already have caused
wireless service providers to recall
thousands of phones.
These multimedia handset errors lead
to more in-bound customer calls and
more customer care time spent resolv-
ing issues. Combined, all of these
activities are driving up operational
costs for wireless service providers.
Bringing the Three Screens to Life 5
Testing services available today, such
as the service available from
Accenture, can:
• Increase the efficiency of evaluating
handset requirements
• Industrialize the handset testing
process using a rigorous and
repeatable approach
• Assign end-to-end responsibility of
handset requirements and testing to
one entity
• Realign a wireless service provider’s
organization to efficiently handle
multiple testing requests.
The idea of location-independent and
time-independent access to rich media
content across multiple consumer
screens and devices is an attractive
one. Creating a vision of that future
world is important, but it's also
important to keep pushing beyond
the rhetoric.
Many companies may talk about
threescreen, integrated bundles when,
in fact, they are not doing much other
than offering a discount for a
triple-play bundle.
Bringing the three screens to life
means much more than offering a
discount. What's important is demon-
strating an innovative mindset that
can drive the creation of new services
that link the three screens together
and create new revenuegenerating
opportunities. Telcos have the
opportunity to use their network
infrastructure and customer knowledge
to create compelling services that can
revolutionize the way people live, the
way they work and the way they
access information and entertainment.
The winners in the three-screen world
will be those with the right mix of
both technological acumen and
customer insight capabilities.
Copyright © 2008 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
Technical prowess, combined with
effective operational skills, can help
deliver compelling services that
consumers want to buy. But then, the
companies that retain those customers
and keep driving high performance will
be those with the ability to adapt as
their customers adapt, continuously
building on what they know about
their customers and anticipating
innovations at every new level.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehen-
sive capabilities across all industries
and business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most success-
ful companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and
governments. With more than 175,000
people in 49 countries, the company
generated net revenues of US$19.70
billion for the fiscal year ended Aug.
31, 2007. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.
Contact Us
For more information about how
Accenture's distinctive solutions
and services can help you achieve
high performance by creating,
developing, delivering and managing
innovative services more efficiently
and effectively, contact:
Emmanuel Lalloz
+33 6 32 56 10 61
or emmanuel.lalloz@accenture.com