There’s long since been an idea of collaboration between operators and OTT players. But some don’t quite have that utopian view.
“Every day, every morning, every night, I’m thinking of how to compete with Fiber, Skype and WhatsApp,” Giles Corbett, head of Libon at Orange, told the Telecoms Tech World audience in a lively debate. “I spend my time trying to compete with OTTs.”
Orange’s partnership with music provider Deezer was noted by all participants as an example of an OTT/operator success story, and Corbett explained the difference between this type of OTT product compared with messaging services.
“With Deezer, music is clearly not our business, so a partnership makes sense. But with communications, we get the feeling it kind of is our business,” he explained.
“We want to disrupt ourselves before everyone else does it for us.”
Tim Hayson, evangelist at the Open Mobile Alliance, noted: “Working with OTT players, it’s not necessarily a competition,” he notes, adding: “In many cases, OTT players do [services] really well, [it] can actually benefit the operator.”
Jose Vallas, VP partner products at Telefonica Digital, chose not to side with the operator. “It’s different flavours,” he notes.
“They don’t want to stick with one telco.
“For example Spotify’s getting really close with Telefonica in Spain, but Vodafone and Orange users can still use Spotify.”
Corbett, who spoke to TelecomsTech in August about Libon, Orange’s OTT play, was grim about the prospects of messaging.
“There is no future in messaging revenue. Absolutely none,” he stated. “There is no point in continuing to imagine models that revolve around that, and there isn’t actually much point spending time regretting it either.”
Vallas agreed, but not before noting that Telefonica had killed off TuMe – the exact space Libon is trying to conquer. “The question is whether it’s going to be driven by [telcos] or driven by others,” he noted.
Phillip Julian, principal user experience manager mobile at Vodafone, saw it slightly differently.
“SMS is changing, but the industry evolves,” he said. “Technology progresses, and as long as it continues to address that basic need, the customer will benefit.”
With plenty of strong opinions on show in an operator-heavy discussion, some clarity was provided by the previous session from Analysys Mason on the future of OTT.
The analysts predicted that by 2018 one third of smartphone generated traffic would be from OTT applications. “We expect to see some response from the operators on their own IP services, but the responses are very much unclear,” noted principal analyst Stephen Sale.
Even if the opinions weren’t all in sync, the session certainly proved one thing: operators are thinking hard and long about how to grab their market share back – and it’s now a waiting game to see if the bets pay off.
