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Eurescom study on community interaction A new paradigm for content delivery networks
The community buzz has made its way onto the agenda of telecoms professionals. Many are wondering how the concept of community interaction or group communication in general may change the carrier business. Will it extend its reach from the Internet to the fixed and mobile phone? Are there attractive business opportunities? How can telcos turn a profit out of this phenomenon and what are the technological prerequisites to do so? The Eurescom study “Community Interaction (P1558)”, carried out by professionals from Portugal Telecom, Síminn (Iceland Telecom), Telekom Austria, and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories supported by Trommsdorff + Drüner, addresses the above questions. The study analyzes the communities on four levels (target groups, communication media, content, and motivation) and identifies three deep dive topics (kids interaction, user-generated content, gaming). Children and teen-agers are a target group generally neglected by carriers. According to the “2003 Baur-Kids Verbraucher-Analyse” survey, the 6 million children aged 6-13 in Germany represent a purchasing power of 6 billion Euro. More than 1.6 million of them have mobile phones. In a community context children use phones and the Internet to make appointments for group outings, sports, and to match their clothes, or swap homework before school. Using communities to distribute user-generated content and for gaming is also hardly studied in a professional manner. Most hobby photographers, artists, and musicians like to share their work with friends and family or draw a profit out of their favourite past time. Using platforms like flickr.com or podcasting are increasingly popular ways to do so drawing millions of subscribers and visitors. Massively multiplayer games like EVE Online stimulate the building of “clans” and draw large numbers of fans to the various forums around the game. Here, voice and messaging as well as a helpdesk for the rather complicated games are excellent opportunities for telcos. Business rationale The Eurescom study aims at understanding the factors that influence the success of community businesses. For this reason, a typology of community success factors has been implemented. The problem of cannibalization of traditional revenues is of major interest for telcos. Although community services do have benefits that are not visible in the bottom line (e.g. customer loyalty, etc.), the estimated cannibalization has to be considered for any community service offered. In order to enable telcos to evaluate existing and future community offerings, an Excel-based tool called “Community Evaluation Tool” (CET) was developed as part of the study. The CET takes into account the community success factors as well as the cannibalization threats, and can thus assist decision makers faced with the choice to implement community services. <img successfactors.jpg> Technical feasibility Today, community interaction is mostly happening in an Internet environment. VoIP services emerging from the Internet find it much easier to integrate into existing virtual communities and profit from this interaction than large carriers. With the upcoming IP-Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) incumbent telcos have the possibility to put a stop on this inequality, and offer consumers safe, interoperable services with guaranteed quality of service and flexible charging. The IMS framework also provides the required key community enablers, like presence, profiling and matching, group management, and push services. Conclusion and outlook Community interaction holds many opportunities for carriers if they can quickly adopt IP related network architectures like IMS and fend off the competition from VoIP services. To further explore the opportunities, more market and technology research is needed. Attractive community-enabling services need to be developed and marketed in a way that acknowledges the social ties between users. You can find more information on the following Web pages: Official P1558 Webpage:
http://www.eurescom.de/public/projects/P1500-series/P1558/default.asp Please send us your comments on this article. |
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