Broadband/Cable Operators
Business Drivers
Click the headers below to see more information on the challenges and business drivers for broadband and cable operators.
A key opportunity for broadband operators lies in the merchandizing and sale of digital goods and services. To succeed in the new digital commerce market, operators must expand revenue opportunities by building an appealing catalog of value added services to drive consumer purchase. They need to be able to incentivize customers to buy more premium content and services with special offers including free trials, bundles, subscriptions, promotions, discounting and loyalty programs. Examples of such offers include user created bundles where a user can choose up to five channels for €20 per month or discounts such as watch three movies a month and get the fourth at a discount.
The area of IPTV is another key opportunity for broadband providers, particularly those who are moving towards a multi-offering market such as triple or quad play. One of the key elements of this is TV and movie content. The technology behind this will enable the creation of highly personalized channels which allow for an infinite number of possibilities in terms of combinations of programming. This will make highly targeted advertising possible and will drive ad revenues for IPTV network operators. Some TV companies will also sell advertising and split the revenue with the operator.
Third party charging & Multi-party settlement
A major challenge for broadband and cable operators is how to automate the digital commerce process and manage multiple partner relationships effectively and meet time-to-market demands. They must integrate to a wide range of external systems for provisioning and access control. They need to enable third party charging to increase the range of services they can offer beyond their own portal. This is a more open model where the customers will buy from a third party and the broadband operator will keep a share of the payment for the introduction, the billing process and in some cases.
Today, some settlement is still calculated manually. As merchandizing models get ever more complex, and with the emergence of advertising sponsored content and services, the need to automate the settlement process is becoming ever more critical. With purchase models becoming more 'a la carte' and the emergence of IPTV, automated settlement is a key business driver.
Advanced customer/partner care
Easy-to-use self-care applications reduce customer and partner care costs. Consumers manage their own profile, preferences and balances. Partners manage their own profiles, transaction histories, consumer disputes and review reconciliation and financial reports. Aepona also enables Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to act on behalf of consumers on all issues, but also provides functionality to issue chargebacks and refunds, suspend and terminate users and their payment instruments.
Aepona Solutions
Aepona provides a suite of Operator Payments Services for broadband and cable operators, ranging from advanced merchandizing, payments and settlement solutions. With Aepona's software, broadband operators can expand their service offering to capture digital commerce revenue opportunities.
Aepona can help solve the problems of this market by providing a payment and settlement solution which allows charges from third party content providers to be put on their bills and appropriate revenue sharing settlements to be executed.
In terms of IPTV, Aepona can solve the problems of this market by providing an infrastructure based on Aepona's Payments and Settlement Engine (PSE) for handling direct-to-bill based payment models. This includes the ability to integrate with multiple third party providers of programming such as aggregators, production companies or studios. Aepona's PSE subscriptions module can easily manage recurring payments, while the PSE settlement module will calculate the payments from the IPTV network, the studio, the partner and the network provider.
By using the expanding merchandizing capabilities in Aepona's PSE, a wide range of facilities can be provided that enable broadband and cable MSOs to encourage customers to increase their spending through the use of discounts, product bundles, up sell and cross sell incentives.
Aepona's Operator Payment Services solutions enable broadband operators, cable MSOs and ISPs to create new relationships with customers by accelerating the growth of digital commerce.
The convergence of communications with media and entertainment services is an industry phenomenon that is opening up significant opportunities for all categories of Internet service providers. Cable and broadband operators can now leverage their relationships with the customer and expand their offerings beyond traditional services to generate additional revenues which help offset falling ARPU.
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