Speaking at the Amdocs Asia Pacific InTouch 2013 event in Singapore, Allen Lew – CEO of the Digital Life Group at SingTel – left delegates certain that SingTel has no intention of being left behind as a dumb pipe provider.
Indeed, in his presentation Lew made it quite clear to delegates that the Digital Life Group would be using every asset at its disposal to make sure that SingTel does not cede ownership of subscribers to the global OTT giants.
Lew told delegates that although the OTT players were always going to be a factor in the marketplace, SingTel has some major advantages over the likes of Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook - which it intends to make full use of.
In particular, Lew said that SingTel - as one of the world’s leading multi-national telcos - would be using its market reach of 500 million subscribers spread over multiple countries to build a digital offering that would have huge scale.
Lew said that the crucial advantage that SingTel had over its OTT rivals would be the fact – and this is where companies with the expertise of Amdocs come into the picture – that it has a much better knowledge and understanding of its customers and their usage habits than anyone else.
In a memorable turn of phrase, Lew described this customer knowledge as the “new oil” of the communications industry and said that SingTel would be leaning heavily on using this subscriber data to offer highly personalized services to subscribers.
Finally, Lew said that another critical advantage that SingTel has is the fact that right across its operator portfolio - from cutting-edge Singapore to developing markets like the Philippines - it has an established billing system in place with its subscribers.
This factor, Lew said, puts SingTel in a much better position than its OTT rivals to actually monetize the digital content and services it offers to subscribers.
Although SingTel’s foray into the digital services market remains in its relative infancy, Lew said that the firm was basically focusing its attentions on three core areas.
Firstly, SingTel sees great prospects ahead in what Lew referred to as ‘next generation interaction’ and predicted that in the future subscribers would interact digitally in a much different way than now with interactivity taking on a much more ‘emotional’ edge.
Secondly, Lew said that SingTel still sees huge potential in what he referred to as ‘emotional commerce’ – that being the process whereby SingTel does not necessarily sell products online in the same way that Amazon does but instead uses its huge bank of customer data to direct customers to content and services they will find useful.
Finally, and without question most ambitiously, Lew says that SingTel sees the TV business as one that is “on the verge of significant disruption” and claimed that SingTel was well placed to take advantage as consumers sidelined traditional fixed-position TV sets in favor of tablet and handset viewing.
Lew says SingTel is setting its sights on becoming a gatekeeper in the content business for its subscribers and will use its intimate customer knowledge to direct subscribers to content that has relevance and value to them – from whatever source it might come from.
Great plan – but what about the execution?
It is a bold ambition indeed for an operator like SingTel to try and become the content gatekeeper for its subscribers given that this is also the stated goal of every major OTT player and broadcaster in the global market.
Moreover, in SingTel’s case there is the added complication of the fact that its subscriber markets are so diverse – with very different cultural tastes and bandwidth availability in markets like Singapore and India – that pulling off any group-wide play would be extremely tough.
SingTel’s plans to become a content gate-keeper across its network footprint represents a massive challenge for the operator for a number of reasons.
Firstly, SingTel or its regional affiliates like AIS in Thailand, Globe in the Philippines and others are still not seen as content companies by their subscribers, they are still largely viewed as network operators, providers of connectivity rather than content.
This is an important distinction because whilst subscribers are happy to use recommendations from the likes of Netflix – because it has established a reputation as a content provider in a cut-throat market – they may not see SingTel in quite the same way at this point.
Secondly, not only will SingTel be competing against the global OTT giants in this space but it will also in many markets – India being a prime example – be competing against “local champions” in the form of dominant broadcasters and OTT players who also want to be the ‘go to’ player for subscribers.
This means that whilst SingTel does indeed hold some very valuable cards – customer data, billing relationships and business scale – it will have to take its game to the very highest level if it is to succeed in this area.