This blog series has delved into the Over the Top dilemma that was highlighted in the opening keynotes from Mobile World Congress which took place at the end of February. The dilemma for service providers is that they are competing in the area of communications services with the companies who are providing services on their data networks. And these services are taking revenue away from the service providers, who require CAPEX and OPEX to run the networks.

Last week, I explored at a high level what a service provider could do to compete, such as offering a unique twist to a value-added service. One area this could be in is the mobile video conferencing arena. This application is useful for businesses and for consumers. As we all know, there has to be VALUE offered, but what is that value?

Well, first of all, let’s say you’re part of a business. Right now, let’s say you also use a collaboration tool so people can follow along on a presentation. But now you want to video conference in all your employees as well since it’s a good way to really keep everyone engaged (not that your staff meetings are boring, it’s just that you’re trying to find a way to improve your employee engagement). And some of your employees travel a lot. And your employees also carry very different mobile devices since your IT department basically “gave up” trying to control all of that. And you are trying to do all of this economically – you don’t need a telepresence system. You just basically want what something like Skype offers but you want it to be “more” than that.

What I’ve described above is not unique – it’s pretty typical really. So if a service provider could offer video conferencing ability that could deal with different types of multimedia endpoints (Android, iOS, laptop, even non-smartphone voice only endpoints, etc.), can bill easily, have the ability to stream video into the video conference (say for a training tool), and might have enhanced quality control (since this is all on their network) this would be value, right? I would think so.

So it’s possible. And by the way, if you are interested in something like this, the Dialogic® PowerMedia™ Media Server can do this for you.