As providers begin to offer broadband services, broadcast, pay-per-view and On Demand services, such as video, music and games, they must navigate a far more complex technology landscape than existed just a few years ago. New technology and new standards have added to the challenge of deploying these services. This trend will only increase in the months and years ahead as providers ramp up their efforts to offer next-generation broadband and interactive services and content.

A critical, yet often undervalued, back-office management function is entitlement. Entitlement is the process of authorizing a service (a music or broadcast TV channel, pay per view, etc.) or content (a movie, program, game or special event) to a customer. Entitlement also includes the assignment of rights, which are the rules that govern how services and content can be used. These rights then accompany the content in the form of metadata, which are essentially smart “tags” that outline the use of the content.

Traditional Approaches

Most organizations perform various entitlement management functions through their billing systems, which are designed to authorize and track a customer’s purchases. These billing systems have repeatedly proven their value in the field as accounting tools over the past 20-plus years, and because they have played such a vital role within a provider’s infrastructure, it’s not surprising that many service providers instinctively turned to these systems when it came time to track and authorize customer activity.

After all, billing systems tap into large amounts of data, handle vast quantities of data, and enable accurate billing. They are already configured to work with existing infrastructure, which reduces the need to introduce and beta test new software and hardware. Providers are also highly familiar with the way these systems operate, and the ability of these systems to enable accurate billing is well established.

As shown in Diagram A, a provider may use multiple billing systems to manage and bill for different services or subscribers. In this approach, each service is handled separately via a direct connection to the billing system. Information cannot be exchanged from one system to the next, and information must be extracted from the appropriate system.

Providers are now beginning to discover that while billing systems can provide a basic level of entitlement support, the systems are not optimized to perform in this capacity. Specifically, the traditional approach forces different billing solutions together and creates additional work, because providers must typically lean heavily on their internal resources when it comes to reconfiguring or troubleshooting these custom-built, in-house systems for entitlement functions. Providers have also found it challenging to gather and analyze data from billing systems in order to make critical business decisions. In using a billing system to perform the entitlement function, providers are also strictly limited in the way they can “push,” or send, broadband services and content offerings out to customers.

These challenges will increasingly limit telcos as they begin to offer a wide range of broadband services and seek to maximize the way that these services are offered. Without a way to access information housed within multiple billing systems, telcos cannot easily provide services such as real-time customer support and self care. Telcos are also dealing with complex service and content offerings. As telcos look to sign up customers for bundled services, it becomes necessary to combine billing information across multiple services to increase customer loyalty and gain a competitive advantage. And to support new services and offerings, telcos must also be able to integrate to both the conditional access system (CAS) and digital rights management (DRM).

Entitlement Management Systems: A New Approach

With the inherent complexities and challenges of these home-grown entitlement solutions, it’s not surprising that more providers are turning to entitlement management systems, which are already being deployed in the U.S. by some of the major service providers. As with any new technology deployment, these early implementations are increasing the level of interest from other providers as they equip their networks to support broadcast, pay-per-view and On Demand services and content.

Built to support the advent of next-generation services, entitlement management systems do not replace the need for billing systems. Rather, they are designed to work with existing billing systems. Entitlement management systems can also work with multiple billing systems within the same organization, which is a fairly common scenario that occurs as organizations merge and/or become acquired or chose to transition from one billing system to another.

As shown in Diagram B, an entitlement management system provides centralized access to information by gathering and storing customer data, such as purchase history and demographics, from multiple databases within the billing system. By serving as a central repository of information, the entitlement managent system makes it easier to sort data and run reports. Unlike a typical billing system, entitlement managment systems can readily consolidate and add data related to each service -- such as music, games, and videos – to create a more complete “view” of each customer. This allows the provider to see how each customer is utilizing various types of content and services.

Entitlement in next-generation networks goes beyond determining which customers can access particular content – which is a typical function performed by billing systems, conditional access systems and other security systems. When properly deployed in the network, entitlement management systems can improve a provider’s bottomline by providing new opportunities for using and positioning numerous types of content to customers. It opens the door to bundling content packages, such as films featuring a specific actor, and target market pricing, which allows specially priced offers to be made on a regional basis. Essentially, any service or content that is offered by a service provider can be included in the entitlement management process.

Entitlement Management Systems: Offering New Capabilities

Entitlement management systems are designed to support the increasing complexities of broadcast, pay-per-view and On Demand content. These systems are capable of supporting a wide range of new functionality and opportunities, which include the following:

Real-time access to information: When a customer orders a new service, they want to be able to access the service immediately. On the provider side, this means that the customer data must be dynamically updated to create an accurate picture of every user, as well as every new user. Entitlement management systems can be configured to automatically update customer information whenever a change occurs, ensuring that information is accurate.

Credit Checks: When a customer signs up for a new service, entitlement management systems can quickly run credit checks on customers. For example, when a customer orders a new On Demand movie, the entitlement management system could check to see if the customer is up to date on payments for previous services. Based on that information, the provider would be able to either grant or deny access to content based on near real-time account information. In another example, an entitlement management system could also check a customer’s account information before new services are provisioned and provide various levels of access based on payment history.

Self Care: Whenever customer has increased control over their services, the support responsibility shifts away from a telco’s customer support representatives to the customer, which saves telcos money and resources. Entitlement management systems can enable an increased level of subscriber self service. For example, a subscriber would be able to not only access their bill, but also change their subscriber profile (items such as nPVR allocation), update or change their service preferences, or adjust their parental access controls based on genre (e.g. movies, games, music, etc.) through the Internet using their pc or mobile devices.

Content Tracking: entitlement management systems can track customer access and usage for a particular piece of content. For example, a customer may pay to play a game 10 times. When it comes time to play the game, the entitlement management system could determine that the customer has enough credit remaining to play five games.

Entitlement management systems can also track what content has been viewed. For example, a customer could order a package of all six Star Wars movies at a special rate that entitles the customer to watch each movie only once. The system would then track which movies were viewed and allow the customer to access only the movies that have not been viewed. The provider could also use the entitlement management system to set expiration date for the content.

Entitlement management systems can also track what is being viewed on each set top box. For example, a customer could “pause” content on one set top box and resume viewing from the same point on another set top box by utilizing “bookmarks” on the content. These bookmarks are stored on the entitlement server and are thus video server independent. This flexibility would serve as a service differentiator and could prompt customers to purchase more content.

Targeted Offers: entitlement management systems are capable of distributing highly targeted offers to specific customers. This function is performed through the entitlement management system’s “offer engine” which adds additional intelligence to the network. For example, an offer for a premium movie service could be sent to customers within a specific ZIP code to help ensure that the offer will reach the most relevant audience. On a more granular level, an offer for a new music service could be sent to those who have previously ordered similar types of music. The system could also track how a particular offer fares. For example, it would be possible to determine not only who purchased the offer, but if they made a purchase after seeing a new advertising campaign.

Upsell Opportunities: Another capability that is gaining attention is “upsell”, which is the sale of additional content or services after a customer has purchased or inquired about content or services. The ability to dynamically upsell via the set top box means that customers no longer have to contact customer service, and this opens up additional revenue opportunities that were previously unavailable to providers. That is because, until recently, providers have been limited in their ability to “push,” or send, customized offers and new and enhanced services to customers.

Entitlement management systems are now making it possible to automatically present the customer with offers to purchase content or upgrade their services based on the customer’s actions. For example, if a customer allows a premium movie service to expire and then tries to view a movie offered by this service, the entitlement management system would recognize this and present a specially priced offer to the customer. The offer could include a price to purchase the movie, or an “upsell” option to both order the movie and re-subscribe to the service at a special rate.

Content Customization: When configured correctly, providers can customize the rights that govern how content can be used and re-used, which results in increased control over each piece of content. For example, a provider could designate a movie or special event as “play once” or “play and record.” This ability allows providers to assign a tiered pricing structure to each piece of content. In this case, the price of the content would increase as more flexibility in how it can be used is offered.

Deploying Entitlement Management Systems

To help ensure successful deployment within a provider’s existing infrastructure, providers should look to entitlement management systems that are based on open standards – meaning that they are compatible with a provider’s existing, industry-standard infrastructure, including billing systems, content servers and navigation servers. By serving as an interface between the customer’s services and the billing systems, open standards-based entitlement management systems help to ensure that configuration and time to go-live are kept to a minimum.

Entitlement management systems based on open standards are an economical option as networks scale to offer new and emerging services to a growing customer base. Unlike proprietary systems, http/https- and XML-based entitlement management systems can be re-configured as needs evolve. As an added benefit, entitlement management systems are expected to streamline the migration/transition to new versions of billing systems, because entitlement management systems consolidate information and in some cases can reduce latency by simplifying the interconnections needed within the network.

Another key advantage to open entitlement management systems is their ability to enable and facilitate new CableLabs® standards, for content distribution and packaging. New standards are set for release later this year that will allow providers to configure customized, targeted offers and prices for content and services, while enabling new selling opportunities across their entire customer base in near-real time.

Telcos entitlement management systems should also be capable of supporting multiple billing systems simultaneously. They must also enable real-time entitlement and service offerings, support an enhanced level of self care and subscriber profiling, and integrate with multiple, complex offerings. Lastly, entitlement management systems should integrate to both conditional access and digital rights management systems to support video services and products.

Conclusion

The rising demand for new content and services is driving the need for real-time customer interaction and communications. Those providers that understand the inherent complexities of broadband content and the possibilities offered by entitlement management systems will be better equipped to fully utilize their content, enable increased options for customers, and ultimately realize a far greater return on their technology investment.

Armando Martinez is Senior Vice President of Engineering for IMAKE.

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