AT&T in Mexico becomes OTT super-aggregator

AT&T in Mexico discovered that traditional direct carrier billing (DCB) solutions could only solve part of the problem. While these can allow OTT providers to exploit the carrier’s billing relationships, they don’t work the other way around – doing little to help AT&T in Mexico aggregate and offer OTTs to its customers and deliver an improved, personalized experience. What’s more, old-fashioned DCB systems offer inflexible pricing models and a poor customer experience, leaving users to navigate a confusing and fragmented process, different for each OTT service they purchase.

AT&T in Mexico faced the complexity of making OTT subscriptions work effectively with its existing OSS/BSS billing systems, finding significant differences between traditional carrier billing and paid-in-advance recurring subscriptions for media and entertainment services. This threatened to impact the user experience unless the provider was able to support modern digital media models.

AT&T recognized the importance of curating a broad range of content apps and other digital OTT services for both consumers and business customers. But after an initial bespoke integration with Netflix, the carrier realized that onboarding each new platform through a separate technology integration project was unsustainable. Not only would this be very costly, significantly reducing margins, but it would take too long to make exciting new OTT services available to eager consumers in a sector where rapid time-to-market is now a core advantage. If AT&T in Mexico was unable to launch popular new OTT services quickly and cheaply, it would impact its relationship with consumers and leave the market wide open for more nimble competitors.

Engaging consumers by curating the ideal range of digital content services depends on access to good quality data about they’re watching. Previously, AT&T in Mexico’s business team had to log in to multiple systems to view the performance of each OTT partner. With MarketONE, all metrics and KPIs are in one place, making it simple to view the performance of each partner and enabling faster, better business decisions.

Digital media consumers are inundated with choice and winning a share of their viewing time and wallet demands AT&T in Mexico brings new services to market quickly. In an unpredictable era, it’s also vital to ensure OTT services can be scaled up rapidly if they become a surprise hit, while minimizing costs for less-popular options. MarketONE is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform running in Amazon Web Services, meaning it can be deployed very rapidly, and scaled up and down without delay to meet demand. The need for up-front capital investment is avoided, and the cost of operating the platform is directly linked to its success for the carrier. The rapid time-to-market for launching new OTT services maximizes conversion of new partnerships into revenue.

A wide range of OTT content and service provider partners is pre-integrated with MarketONE. Launching a new service becomes a “plug and play” task delivered in a matter of weeks, rather than being a major project lasting many months – as AT&T in Mexico’s initial integration of Netflix became. The result is AT&T in Mexico’s launch of a compelling offer of more than seven leading OTT services, including its own premium soccer app and access to the Google Play store, in less time than it would otherwise have taken to integrate a single partner.