Convergence, personalization and high quality: Accenture helps Telecom Italia consolidate multimedia services to deliver a seamless customer experience

Leading the telecommunication, media and entertainment business, Telecom Italia is taking its reputation for innovation to the next level with the adoption of an integrated multimedia service center for all the fixed and mobile customers. The new platform integrates digital content from a wide range of providers into a unified catalog offering video, music, books and games. Based on Accenture Video Solution software, this new platform is on trend – meeting customer demands for seamless access to content, while providing the company with must-have agility in a digital world.

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Italy’s largest telecommunications company, Telecom Italia is also active in the media and manufacturing industries. The company operates fixed broadband and telephone services in Italy and mobile phone services in Italy and Brazil through its TIM subsidiary.

Reinventing its business in the digital era, Telecom Italia must keep pace to fulfill the ever-changing needs and desires of its customers, in order to capitalize on the opportunities generated by new technologies. Customers’ demand for seamless access to multimedia content call for a new approach, supported by unified platforms that can provide a truly convergent, high-quality and personalized user experience, replacing legacy capabilities built as vertical service silos.

Overview

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In 2010, Telecom Italia launched CUBOSUITE, its over-the-top (OTT) digital offering for the consumer market, composed of a video-only service (“Cubovision”), new dedicated channels for music (“Cubomusica”), e-books (“Cubolibri”) and games (“Cubogiochi”). The service was available via 13 different types of devices, including iOS, Android and SmartTV. In 2013, Telecom Italia changed its multimedia services brand to “TIMsuite” (TIMvision, TIMmusic, TIMreading and TIMgames).

However, as the market developed, Telecom Italia needed a rapid evolution of the customer offering,

Opportunity converging the OTT suite towards a single, integrated multimedia service center. Besides meeting customer demands for a converged user experience, this unified approach to multimedia services would help drive increased bandwidth usage – one of the company’s key objectives. Other benefits from the new platform would be reduced total cost of ownership, faster time to market to launch new services and capabilities, and increased ability to create, bundle and target multiple personalized content offerings at different price points, across multiple screens.

With this integrated platform in place, Telecom Italia would have an unprecedented opportunity to grow multimedia service consumption across its fixed and mobile customer base. The ability to provide a convergent user experience would differentiate the company from its competitors and help establish closer, more durable relationships with the audience. In a market where personalization has become an essential requirement for content service providers, this would be a key capability.

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Seeking to transform its OTT service platforms for videos, music, e-books and games into a single multimedia platform, Telecom Italia needed a partner with a proven track record in digital service management and delivery of innovative video services.

Having worked with Accenture since 2003 to build, deploy and operate the IPTV platform, Telecom Italia was already aware of Accenture’s deep digital video specialization, global industry understanding and knowledge of communications network technologies. On top of this, the company chose Accenture Video Solution (AVS) to implement an “industry standard” multimedia service center, providing its customers with a seamless multi-device user experience to access content. With this in mind, Telecom Italia selected Accenture as its partner for the transformation ahead.

Telecom Italia and Accenture started working together in May 2013. The immediate priority was to implement AVS as the foundation for Telecom Italia’s

Telecom Italia selected Accenture to evolve its OTT service platforms into a unique, multimedia service center based on Accenture Video Solution (AVS). The new integrated TIMSUITE service provides fixed and mobile customers with a seamless and enhanced user experience to consume digital content.

Solution

converged multimedia service center. An innovative digital content platform, AVS would be the engine to deliver seamless, content-rich and high-quality user experiences to multiple types of device. As a pre- integrated platform based on Accenture-owned software components, AVS manages the entire integrated content and business workflow around OTT, enabling service management, delivery and monetization within the same solution.

Key features of the implementation included adaptation of AVS to Telecom Italia specifications, along with transformation from the existing TIMSUITE OTT service platforms to the new consolidated platform. The immediate objective was to carry out an in-depth assessment of the video architecture and design that would be required for the new integrated service. Critical to ensuring a rapid, seamless implementation, this stage of the project focused on gathering and understanding Telecom Italia’s strategic objectives for its

integrated multimedia service center, assessing the company’s “as is” technology architecture and defining the “to be” architecture blueprint.

With this initial phase concluded, the Accenture and Telecom Italia teams began working together to deploy the new solution in a complex framework where AVS and Telecon Italia legacy systems had to be integrated in the new service delivery platform. The implementation was performed by the Accenture team working on-site with the Telecom Italia team, supported by specialists from Accenture’s Italy-based AVS center.

In what was an extremely demanding project, perhaps the biggest challenge of all was the integration of different content providers in the new multimedia service center, to deliver content anytime, anywhere and to multiple devices. In total, the combined TIMvision catalog contains over 6,000 videos and 12 million songs.

As well as delivering immediate benefits through converged access to digital content, the new multimedia service centre provides Telecom Italia a future-ready platform for growth, as Daniela Biscarini (Head of Multimedia Entertainment at Telecom Italia) explains: “As a fully integrated service, TIMSUITE gives our customers easy access to all their digital content needs. And because it’s almost infinitely scalable, we can extend this offering as our digital catalog continues to grow. With Accenture Video Solution, we found the platform we needed to make this happen and working with Accenture, we were able to proceed rapidly towards launch and all the benefits that this will bring to our business.”

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With the implementation phase of the project completed within a challenging time frame, Telecom Italia was able to take the new offering to market by 2014, leveraging AVS’s high level of industrialization.

Thanks to the extensive content catalog and distribution now fully available in the cloud, Telecom Italia can deliver a faster and improved customer experience, while driving costs down. Telecom Italia benefits from a reduced total cost of ownership – with greater flexibility to offer a large selection of titles at competitive prices.

By providing consumers integrated access to all their digital content needs, Telecom Italia’s new multimedia service center will drive increased broadband usage, as well as reducing total cost of ownership and accelerating time to market to launch new services and capabilities.

Results

The new platform provides a single Central Management Point to control the entire user experience. Though the Central Management Point the TIMSUITE team can ingest new content, create ad-hoc campaigns, push higher margin content and test new features and content before deploying changes to the audience. Telecom Italia can also run special campaigns, offer trial periods and create dynamic discount policies for individual users.

Thanks to the implementation of an integrated multimedia content center, Telecom Italia can now provide a compelling and differentiated consumer experience, positioning the company for future growth.

Giuseppe Capuozzo, Managing Director at Accenture responsible for Multimedia Entertainment, sums up: “As consumer behaviors continue to evolve, the ability to provide a converged gateway to all consumers’ digital content needs is becoming a must-have capability. With the successful go-live of the new multimedia service, Telecom Italia has taken its digital credentials to the next level – and raised the bar for digital excellence in Europe and beyond.”

Key Results:

Telecom Italia was ready to take its offering to market within a very stringent timeline.

The new platform provides a single central management point to control the entire user experience.

With its extensive content catalog and distribution, Telecom Italia can deliver a faster and improved customer experience, while driving down costs.

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Accenture Project Team

Massimiliano Monaco Managing Director

Giuseppe CapuozzoManaging Director

Orlando OnoratoSenior Manager