Huawei has released a new hybrid video solution, “Huawei Envision”, which it says can help telecoms operators worldwide develop video delivery as a fundamental service in what the company called the “video 2.0 era”.
"The 1.0 era when video services were regarded as value-added services has gone and an increasing number of carriers are [approaching] videos as a fundamental service, changing their development strategies from ‘data network-centric’ to ‘video network-centric’,” Song Xiaolong (pictured), president of Huawei Digital Service Product Line, told a conference at Huawei’s Operations Transformation Forum in Wuzhen, China.
In the 2.0 era, Song noted, videos are becoming more ubiquitous, and are driving growth in multiple video-related industries. Accordingly, the video ecosystem is booming.
Meanwhile, technologies such as 4K, UHD, virtual reality, augmented reality, cloudification and IP-based technologies are helping to improve the user experience and quality of videos. Operators are also extending their video services beyond entertainment offerings.
“[Operators] are expanding video services from entertainment videos for individual users to real-time communications and industry videos, such as security protection and city monitoring videos, and user generated content (UGC) videos,” Song said. He added that these new segments could translate into hundreds billion US dollars of revenues for telecoms operators.
A recent third-party survey indicates that about 70% of Top 100 operators globally have developed their own video business, while 50% of the Top 50 operators have positioned video as a fundamental service, rather than a VAS. For example, China’s three major carriers - China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom – have already strategically assigned video as an essential service. AT&T in US has also been targeting new vertical markets based on video capability, such as digital home, mobile medical treatment and the Internet of vehicles.
Industry research forecasts that in 2020, more than 80% of the data traffic delivered over telco’s networks will come from video. By 2020, the total market size for pay video alone will reach $560 billion, and telecoms operators will capture more than $100 billion of this revenue.
Bridging the gap between telcos and content providers
To tap the huge market potential of the video business, Song said operators need to have the right business strategy, an all-in-one convergent platform that enables fast service delivery, and a well-established ecosystem that supports operators on the fronts of content, platform and device.
Song said Huawei positions itself as video technology provider, video business enabler and video ecosystem contributor by providing a cloud-based, end-to-end video solution.
“Until now, lots of operators’ video platforms have been siloed, not cloud-based, which makes it difficult to support the development and evolution of their video business,” the executive said.
Huawei Envision consists of the Envision Video Platform, Envision Cloud and Envision Ecosystem.
With the cloud-native Envision Video Platform, thanks to fixed-mobile and cross-boundary convergence, operators can turn video into a fundamental service for the video 2.0 era, providing a high quality customer experience, intelligent operation and agile maintenance.
The Envision Cloud enables quick service launch through cloud, allowing operators and content providers to launch video services in a fast and cost-effective manner. Time to market can be reduced from 10 months to 2 weeks or even one week, Song said.
The Envision Ecosystem brings together over 600 operators worldwide and over 300 video content providers, such as Alibaba-owned 4K Garden, alike to help all stakeholders in the value chain to accelerate the development of the video business, including content, production, aggregation, distribution and consumption.
On the operators side, China Telecom Jiangxi subsidiary, for example, is working with Huawei to revamp its video platform and reposition video offering as a fundamental service, as part of the telco’s fixed mobile convergence strategy.
By the end of this year, Jiangxi Telecom will roll out new video services with better customer experience and content powered by the Huawei Envision.