Multiscreen home at one point of time used to imply that the customer had multiple televisions in the house and you could sell them multi-tv home bundles as a value offering. Studies show that more and more consumers, especially in the younger demographic are skipping television all together. A lot of content consumption is happening on mobile devices and computers. With independent providers of streaming services such as Netflix in the U.S. becoming better established and mature, they have started generating original content that rivals anything that the top studios are producing. As Netflix expands rapidly to Europe, the same challenges are set to emerge.
If that wasn’t competition enough, you have services like Aereo coming in and adding to the disruption. Although currently under litigation, quite similar to how digital music was around the turn of the millennium, once this industry reaches a stage of maturity, it too will alter the perception of the multi-screen home. Here is a glimpse of the future that is already here: http://i.imgur.com/LYovYMW.jpg
Commoditization of bandwidth has ushered a whole different kind of “dot” com bubble, with carriers facing an onslaught of OTT services that often compete with value added servers delivered by carriers. The eternal question now is how to earn customer goodwill and create an affinity for the carrier products and value added services.
Multiple providers and platforms delivering services to the customer who in turn is consuming them from the same device in a way represent an opportunity for carriers. Let’s first start by examining what contributes to an uneven customer experience. Multiple devices imply interconnectivity and challenges that go along with such an environment. Not only are the devices talking to the network equipment, they are also talking to the home network environment and other devices on the network. What this means is every screen is being affected by every other “screen”. Unlike your grandpa’s multi-screen home, your multi-screen home is more interconnected and vulnerable to issues caused by interactivity. The question worth asking is whether comprehensive tech support for the digital home be a key differentiator for carriers.
Some carriers already think so. Comcast and AT&T in North America have introduced services to address these very challenges.
Submitted by Vishal Dhar, iYogi.
