Synopsis
The original concept of triple play is linked to the old telco way of thinking – it is based on locking customers into their services rather than creating new customer benefits.
We believe that triple play should stand for the ability to deliver access to all forms of communication over the one connection. Telcos and ISPs need to make this possible. The services they can offer should be aligned with this and should include security, storage, billing, and all kinds of extra enhancement, depending on the specific applications – for example, a games hobbyist has different bandwidth requirements from a video downloader.
Around the world, telcos have not been very successful is selling content; nevertheless, stimulated by the current interest in IPTV, many telcos are still trying to hang onto the old model.
However, with devices such as smartphones, tablets and smartTVs the traditional triple play model will soon disappear.
With the prospect of the NBN the telecommunications, entertainment, video and multimedia markets in Australia are undergoing sweeping changes, currently characterised by the increasing array of products and services that can be delivered over this infrastructure to consumers.
The connected or smartTV will soon be a major entertainment hub of the digital home, with Gigabit WiFi and WiFi repeaters bringing signals to laptops, tablets and smartphones around the house.
Pay and cable TV operators, telecommunications firms, consumer electronics and IT companies are all competing to provide various digital media services. These services require a large amount of bandwidth, and as such are typically provided over high-speed connections based on fibre optical or hybrid-fibre-coaxial (HFC) networks.
So far the combined package has not been priced attractively enough to attract large number of customers, but there is now a range of different offerings that provide competitive access to a variety of services and, as such, triple play as an access solution is becoming a vanilla product rather than an upfront sales channel.
Hot Topics:
Triple play, smartphones, tablets, smartTV, IPTV, VoIP, media centre, cloud computing.
Companies covered in this report include:
Telstra, Optus, TPG, TransACT, Google, Apple, Facebook, ACCC
