Yesterday, Sandvine announced a video optimization implementation together with Mobixell at a new US customer, nTelos Wireless. Beyond the story of a new customer and the partnership between Mobixell and Sandvine, there lies another, more global story.

There’s no secret that the video optimization market is evolving. Needs are changing as operators adjust their vision of the future. While most optimization sales until now have been about cost savings or traffic volume control, mobile operators are talking more about what the next major source of revenue will be.

One thing is for sure: Video optimization will play a part in the future of winning mobile operators, regardless of whether they are looking only to reduce their bottom line or to add new services that can complement, and perhaps someday eclipse basic data sales.

As Don Bowman, Sandvine CTO, pointed out in a recent blog post, not all video optimization solutions are alike. And that’s an important fact for operators to remember as they consider future business planning. If an operator is looking to simply cut costs with optimization, then they can achieve that goal with one of the advanced optimization solutions available today.

But down the road, the winners among mobile operators will be those who are brave enough to accept that straight data revenue will eventually flatten out, (as did messaging and voice before it), and that they need to embrace new network monetization models to ensure a profitable future. Whatever those monetization models will be, they start with a network that can handle data intensive services – optimized networks.

Operators are starting to take baby steps – Mobixell customers are using policy management to offer targeted services, including video optimization; they are already generating millions of advertising dollars with our platform; and they are showing growing interest in the potential that mobile customer engagement tools hold for the future of their service strategies.

Eventually, some brave operator will step forward and do something crazy – perhaps set up a policy to buy and sell premium content for their subscribers, similar to the cable TV model. Whatever that crazy step into the future of mobile mega revenue, it will rely on optimized video. This vision of the future is not just a dream: It has to happen for operators to move past the commodity data model. It is what is driving our product goals today so that we can offer operators easy-to-use tools for generating new revenues. This is only a peek into the future with video optimization as a prerequisite for network monetization.

Tell us what you think.

We’ll be discussing this and related issues in an upcoming webinar on May 30th together with Teresa Cottam of Telesperience titled ‘What Video Optimization Experts Are Not Telling you‘. More in our next post.

Azi Ronen, Broadband Traffic Management Blog

Yehuda Elmaliach - CTO, Mobixell

Yesterday, Azi Ronen published a guest post by Yehuda Elmaliach, CTO, Mobixell in his Broadband Traffic Management blog.

Without going into all the details, Yehuda talked about the inevitability of huge data growth and how 4G/LTE will create even more bandwidth demand just as 3G did. He explains how volume growth is inevitable even with great volume reducing optimization. But that congestion management would be the key for future sustainability of mobile business models.

Azi also revealed the new Mobixell infographic that shows the recent history of mobile video optimization and some of the technologies that are becoming critical components for mobile Internet services.

I sat down with a good friend of mine for some grown-up conversation last weekend.  She and her husband have a lot on their plate right now; they just bought their first home, they have a baby on the way and work around the clock to make sure they save as much as possible before their baby comes. A typical young couple struggling to make it through the current economy. So when she received her cellphone bill last month, she nearly had a heart attack. She went over her data package by only 15MB. But those 15MB DOUBLED her monthly bill.

Of course, there is personal accountability, and she should have checked her balance during the month to make sure this didn’t happen. But with her busy work schedule and frequent appointments with her obstetrician and all the other ‘baby people’, she didn’t have the chance to spend 5 minutes every few days on the phone with a representative just to check her balance. Her story made me think about the Mobixell Interactive Toolbar. If only she had it on her phone all she would need to do is look at her balance from time to time. It would have been right there on her screen, showing her how much she’s used whenever she wanted to know. She could have also used the toolbar to set up alerts for her current balance and usage status, notifying her when she is reaching her data cap.

Mobile operators often provide good customer support when customers come to them. Now, the Mobixell Interactive Toolbar gives operators a way to maintain the relationship with every subscriber on a day-to-day basis. It takes the relationship to the next level and gives subscribers the feeling that they are in control. I’m not a control freak, but who doesn’t like to feel they have some control in their lives? When my mobile operator gives me that feeling, it makes me a fan and strengthens my loyalty.

BTW, if you want to see a great new video about the Mobixell Interactive Toolbar and all the other features it offers, click here.

Tsippi Dach-Paura
Mobixell

Our team is back from Vienna, with feedback from the Mobile Network Optimisation conference on the 7^th and 8^th of June.

Reporting from Vienna were Matt Dunnett, who chaired the second day of the conference and Ansgar Erlenkoetter who presented a session on day one entitled Determining how to optimise your network without compromising the customer experience.

Not surprisingly, the most pressing concern cited repeatedly was that video traffic, far more than any other mobile data category, is plugging up the network. In one presentation, Vodafone Spain noted that 21% of all devices on their network were dongles but that they take up 76% of the bandwidth. They presented on the introduction of HPSA and how Smartphone proliferation and app download patterns, among other factors, have caused them to completely change their philosophy on network design.

In another presentation, a consulting firm said that one of their MNO customers measured 4% of subscribers taking up 82% of network bandwidth. As the old song goes, that’s entertainment.

Ansgar noted that following his presentation, the message that a number of audience members identified with was that ‘video experience is considered key by end users’ and how there are currently no good RAN-level solutions to properly measure video experience as a KPI. Some in the audience felt, that it would make sense to have tighter coordination between Internet gateways and the RAN. (Good idea.)

Finally, it was interesting to hear some of the engineers in the audience agree with our assertion that even when LTE is widespread and RAN-level optimization is implemented, even this spectrum will eventually get used up and new innovations in video optimization will need to continue to be developed.

We’re working on it. Come back soon for more updates about what’s in store from Mobixell.

Noam Green
VP Marketing, Mobixell

With the explosion of data traffic in mobile network, much of which is driven by video content, many Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are evaluating video optimization solutions as a mechanism to reduce the volume of data in their networks.

The main techniques in video optimization are lossless optimization, often referred to just-in-time delivery as the rate of delivery is controlled to be the same as the bit-rate of the video, and lossy optimization, where the bit-rate of the video is reduced.

Mobixell latest study proved that there are significant differences in the quality produced by Mobixell’s solution compared to other solutions deployed.  The goal is to use extensive video expertise to maintain the user experience to a point where any change resulting from lossy optimization is nearly unnoticeable.

Mobixell optimized the videos without reducing the frame-rate as our goal is to maintain the quality of the video as close to that of the original as possible and hence provide a mobile broadband experience that is representative of a fixed broadband experience. Market feedback is that maintaining the quality of video, especially the original frame-rate, is essential to avoid potential issues from subscribers and content-providers

Additionally, Mobixell’s unique statistical optimization caching functionality allows lossy optimization to be targeted on popular multiple play videos and as such further reduces the TCO of a video optimization solution. This intelligent selective investment approach allows Mobixell to spend more CPU cycles for better video quality , for example encoding with the H.264 high profile.