Billing & OSS World: Content Lifecycle Session Checks in on TMF’s Catalyst Content Encounter

Members of the TeleManagement Forum used Tuesday’s “Managing the Content Lifecycle” cycle session at the Billing & OSS World show to discuss a Catalyst project called the Content Encounter.

Content Encounter, which is about managing content from creation to monetization, was launched about a year ago by TMF. Phase one of the Catalyst on Content Encounter took place at last year’s TMF show in Dallas.

Jim Warner, vice chairman of TMF, who moderated the B/OSS World panel, said Content Encounter addresses the fact that service providers are expanding to provide entertainment and other content, and that creates a multitude of new partnerships, which have different dynamics depending upon who and what is involved. Because all these new parties are entering the fray, he said, there are too many permutations manage, so one-to-one deals are no longer feasible. That led TMF to begin developing an ecosystem for crafting standards around the content lifecycle. Key companies involved in that effort include Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, AT&T, BEA, BT, Cognizant, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Subex, Telcordia and Westwood One.

Billing & OSS World panelist Roger Bales, senior marketing manager of telecommunications solutions for IBM Sales & Distribution, said his company is involved with the front end of the process in the Content Encounter Catalyst project. It brought in content from different sources, such as Westwood One, and in doing so tagged the content based on how it would be used and on what devices it would be presented. IBM technology in play in Content Encounter include its WebSphere middleware, its MediaHub for centralized storage, and its BladeCenter technology.

Panelist Johanne Mayer, director of communication OSS professional services for Alcatel-Lucent, said her company brought to the Catalyst event a case study for service delivery. It helped show how businesses could use location-based technology to provide individuals who call those businesses directions via SMS. (Phase 2 of this Catalyst, which takes place next month at TMF in Nice, will also involve IM and buddy lists.) Also included in this Catalyst was the ability to provide those calls with coupons to use at those businesses, to give callers an added incentive to come and spend money. Alcatel-Lucent provided some of the IMS and SDE equipment for the Catalyst, but also with IBM helped write the application and provided OSS service fulfillment.

Stephen Fleece, Cognizant Technology Solutions’ communications industry-digital content lead, said in Phase 1 of this Catalyst it focused on the Content Commerce Interface, through which service providers can accept the content and data around it. This is a key enabling standard the industry needs, he said, and in this phase the interface was based on the ISO MPEG21 standard. It describes the data so content discovery search engines and, in turn, users can find the content and so that service providers can sell and capture revenue based on that content.

Also on the panel was Lee Chow of AT&T, who talked about the company’s U-verse services and three-screen strategy.

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