Few trends are hotter than e-books. They have become the dominant way for people to consume non-periodical content and clearly are the future of book consumption. However, despite the trend not all niche and non-English-speaking markets are properly served by digital media store providers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple. In evaluating this market, Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) in a recent white paper, Digital Media Store: Realize your digital media future, explains how this presents a great opportunity for telecommunications service providers (SPs).
The reasoning behind this assertion is that SPs are strategically positioned to generate revenue from e-books by providing a digital media store that is accessible everywhere customers go. Telecom SPs have local context. This includes existing digital media services, customer relationships, billing and accounting services, local market presence, local support and WIFI and 3G connectivity. In short, the requisite resources that can be leveraged to make them a strong player in the digital media store market.
The company’s new Digital Media Store, a white-label cloud service, helps providers seize the market opportunity by rolling out a customizable, Apple (News - Alert)-esque online media store with minimal setup. The service opens doors for service providers to transform and simplify their content business by supporting retailing and discovery of applications, e-books and other mobile content across any network and any connected device. The service also supports increased collaboration with the media and advertising industries.
The Digital Media Store platform gives telecoms the capabilities for collaboration, content management, content delivery and both personalization and media discovery. In short it enables SPs to capitalize on a truly growth market by serving as the central facilitator of a robust ecosystem.
A comprehensive solution
The platform includes on-boarding tools that assist with content preparation, reporting and settlement, subscriber management, advertisement management and inventory. This also includes:
- Partner management, such as Service Level Agreement (SLA) management and licensing rights
- Reporting and analytics tools, enabling personalized recommendations, interactive campaigns and metrics
- Exposure of resources, billing and messaging
- APIs for the creation of web services
Content management of e-books and e-zines is assisted by a ingestion and automated workflow, life-cycle management, digital rights management (DRM), transcoding, catalog management, and marketing build into the product.
The Digital Media Store also provides content delivery via streaming and portals, and personalization and discovery services through recommendations, segmentation, campaigns and shared portals with built-in discovery features.
Ready when you are
A preexisting e-books library of more than 500,000 e-books, including more than 20 major local languages, more than 3,500 e-magazines and more than 20,000 audiobooks, helps telecom service providers get their service off the ground fast, according to Alcatel-Lucent. They also point out that the benefit of being able to offer customers a single place where they can access their media from any platform, a key component of Alcatel-Lucent’s Digital Media store, should not be underestimated.
Research by Alcatel-Lucent has shown that:
- 63 percent of consumers are interested in multi-screen services
- 32 percent are willing to sign up for them immediately
- Roughly 24 percent of those polled reported that they would switch providers to receive multi-screen services
- Multiscreen users are 8 percent less likely to switch to another provider
As Alcatel-Lucent contends, what the research demonstrates is that SPs by exploiting the power of a Digital Media Store can become significant players in this market. And, with SPs struggling to create sustainable value-added services as part of their service portfolios now is the time to be looking at what they can bring to the table areas where growth is a virtual certainty.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
