Market Relevance
Technological and regulatory changes have made it possible for the cable, satellite, telecom and mobile operators to undergo a major paradigm shift and a gradual transition from traditional broadcasting to multicasting and unicasting enabling on-demand personal services and applications. This represents operators with the biggest opportunity in their history; as they have the chance to become MSOs (Multi Service Operators), providing personal communication services in a bundled network, distributing content through many different types of networks and to enable their subscribers reach their content anytime anywhere. The communication networks are becoming to be known as content networks providing not only the content but also content related personalized services.
The CAM4Home project will develop an advanced content delivery framework that will be able to deliver and distribute digital content in a novel way by enabling bundling and co-ordinated distribution of digital multimedia content over different content networks to digital home environment. The demand for this kind of content delivery framework has been identified also by market and industry researchers:
"The digital transition's accelerating pace requires a fundamental re-examination of media business models, specifically the optimized bundling of content and new digital distribution channels. This will result in a correspondingly greater burden on IT." *
* Findings From the Gartner 2006 Global Research Meeting: The Complexity of Content/Distribution Issues and IT Solutions Will Rise in Tandem, Document ID: G00137721, February 2006
Market Trends and Drivers
The players in the digital content market are aware that moving towards more on-demand and personalized content gives a tremendous competitive advantage, reducing churn and increasing income. However, the industry is aware that when mass deployments are implemented, the infrastructure will quickly reach the saturation point, and additional technological solutions will be needed. High Definition television (HDTV) puts a further strain on the communication infrastructure, requiring approximately five times the bandwidth of regular broadcasts. The underlying technological complexities for mass deployment have yet to be overcome. On-demand services are showing a promising start, and the industry has been looking at addressing this problem in a variety of ways.
The CAM4Home content delivery framework will provide collaborative aggregated multimedia content distribution and delivery across a range of heterogeneous, multi-domain content networks and platforms enabling content interoperability of the various platforms, middleware architecture and terminals in the digital home environment. The collaborative aggregated multimedia refers to aggregation and composition of individual multimedia contents into a content bundle that may include references to content based services and can be delivered as a semantically coherent set of content over various communication channels. By introducing optimized and seamlessly interoperating content and network services as part of the content delivery infrastructure (e.g. content adaptation, content personalization, personal and community content sharing, and autonomous QoS support of the interpretation and playback environment) the CAM4Home project will address the technological and market challenges introduced increasing need of the end users for personalized on-demand content. Accordingly the CAM4Home project will have relevancy on multiple different segments of ICT markets and the ongoing digital transition and related market developments support the vision and goals of the project.
CAM4Home project will enable content and service providers to maintain or even increase revenues as they can extend their business models towards producing greater values by broadening their reach to new media channels and to offer content across a variety of media channels and formats, deepening their relationships with customers and by offering customers content that meets their needs and personal preferences. Offering a broader range of services such as personalized services is a powerful way to nurture customer relationships and stay abreast of changing market needs.
Due to still ongoing process of Internet Protocol (IP) convergence of various multimedia networks and terminals, and raising penetration rates of digital television the market development of IPTV (both broadcast and interactive) gives a strong indication of CAM4Home project's market relevancy as one of the main enablers for CAM content delivery:
Figure 1: IPTV penetration and revenue forecast by region until 2007 (Source: Business Insights, Technology Report (The Future of Digital Entertainment: The revolution of personal and home technologies in Europe and the US, October 2005))
As visible in Figure 1 Europe becoming the leading player of the IPTV market. CAM4Home will strengthen this development and ensure Europe's leading position in area of IPTV software. Other market drivers for CAM4Home vision and content delivery framework include:
- Increasing penetration of different broadband access technologies (xDSL, cable modem, satellite, UMTS, WiMax, 802.11, fibre to the home/building, etc.) resulting to transition from narrowband access to broadband access.
- The networks are becoming known as content networks, rather than pure infrastructure, demanding network operators to understand not only the implications of seamless access across networks but also the management concepts for future interactive demand and on demand personalized content delivery.
- Digital pay-TV revenues continue to grow at a faster rate than subscribers, as annual average revenue per user (ARPU) grows with price increases and additional services. Revenues will be US$46 billion in 2005 and will rise to US$80 billion in 2009, the high-tech market research firm says.
- The convergence between media and telecom also takes place at the terminal side where terminals such as personal computers, STB, handheld mobile devices are becoming able to produce, communicate as well as consume different formats of content. This is also displayed at the level of service offering where traditional cable operators now offer voice services and vice versa.