Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog: How CSP's can seamlessly blend three screens - TV, Mobile, and Web to provide an immersive user experience

Communication Service Providers around the world are morphing from a simple phone company to a value-added services company spanning the entire gamut of communications, utility, entertainment, and lifestyle services. At the center of all this is their “three-screen strategy”, which combines computer, mobile phone and TV services in a synergistic manner to give the consumers the joy of anytime, anywhere communications and entertainment on virtually any device.

Specifically, by leveraging the ubiquity of mobile phones, flexibility of the web and the reach and awesome display capability of TV, it is becoming possible to offer “blended” services with an unprecedented user experience. Examples of such blended services include: 1. Multi-screen Content Storefront: To monetize on the expensive content across multiple screens. 2. Multi-screen Social networking and Entertainment: Allow customers to interact and stay connected from any device and to do viral marketing. Although it is possible to provide these services with current set of capabilities, but that will result in duplication of effort across screens because of application being built multiple times, inconsistent user experience because of tremendous heterogeneity in user interface, navigation techniques, screen size, resolution, and information not shared across screens because of vertically split layers of information exchange. At Infosys, we are building a product called "Convergence Gateway for Multi-Channel Applications" to address above mentioned needs of Communication Service Providers. Convergence Gateway provides frameworks to do user interface rendering, messaging, security, personalization, and advertising across three-screens in a seamless manner. It also provides hooks to integrate with OSS/BSS and for integration with existing SDP's such as that for delivering the final video. It is based on a SOA based architecture that ensures scalability and extensibility.

Comments

Is there a fourth screen that can be targetted as well? Companies like Comcast are enhancing the good old home landline phone to provide a small display. There was an article on the "Enhanced Cordless Phone" on LightReading recently: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=174853&site=cdn
The same article also mentions Verizon Wireless' Hub.

Commented by: Narayan B | April 21, 2009 6:24 AM

Hi Manish, I believe the Telcos will need to definitely look at a seamless multi-screen experience in order to match the consumers' increasingly sophisticated expectations around ease of management of digital media (whether it is commercial media or user-generated). Though there have been talks about converged multi-screen services for quite some time now, we have not seen any significant momentum in this space from any telco.
Like Narayan has indicated, in this increasingly crowded household/personal electronic equipments space, now we have the 4th screen! AT&T and Embarq are other examples of telcos who have rolled out a 4th screen Home Telephone. As a customer, I would like to see, in the near term, some services that provide a seamless experience atleast across 2 screens if not all.
Manish, what do you think the telcos will need to do to realize such services? Why do you think there is so much delay in rolling out such converged services even though we have been talking about multi-screen User Experience for a long time now?

Commented by: Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri | April 23, 2009 5:12 AM