Tata Play has one of the highest market shares in India’s direct-to-home (DTH) market. The company wanted a streamlined entry into the over-the-top (OTT) sector, aggregating content for providers like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ Hotstar. This includes bundling them into creative and lucrative offers to boost revenues and customer experience, and gain a competitive advantage. It also planned to launch a freemium model app to compete against the likes of YouTube. Its app is open to all phone users across India to consume basic free content with paid-for options provided by partners. Other business goals were to shorten the time to market and boost revenues.

Outcomes

Payment for third-party software

0

reducing total cost of ownership

Play’s new stack

CRM, billing & subscription

is microservices based

Aggregator can target 

1bn+ mobile & 100mn OTT

paid subscribers

Improvement in efficiency

50%

from overall monitoring

Deployed 500 cloud native pods for core network and CPE capacity at

100,000

sites across four zones in India

Deployed 500 cloud native pods for core network and CPE capacity at

100,000

sites across four zones in India

Deployed 500 cloud native pods for core network and CPE capacity at

100,000

sites across four zones in India

Deployed 500 cloud native pods for core network and CPE capacity at

100,000

sites across four zones in India

Tata Play needed a solution that could scale up and down, on-demand because upfront provisioning for potential peak traffic levels is impractical and too expensive. It also wanted to avoid costly payments to a third party for hosting the solution, which has to cater to the 5% of subscribers who pay for content and the 95% that consume freemium content on the Tata Play app. Bundling individual OTT apps involves complex rules to cover on-demand subscriptions, upgrades, downgrades and per-day charging while maintaining existing arrangements with content providers.

The solution has to work efficiently across the customer lifecycle, from onboarding to payments, interactions with customers such as for switching packages, and zero-touch trouble ticketing.

Deploying a solution

The BlueMarble DigitalBSS from Comviva is a cloud-native deployment, aligned with the principles of TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and based on microservices. As the solution scales up and down on demand, Tata Play mostly only pays for actual infrastructure usage: Only the core is a constant cost because it supports minimum configuration and subscriber load.

Comviva tested the system on multiple possible customer scenarios to minimize customers’ complaints and backend interventions. To handle complex interactions, the system transformed TM Forum’s Customer Management API into multiple smaller ones, so that the front-end chatbot can ingest the information on a per-channel basis. It also uses the Forum’s APIs for product ordering and product catalog management for product definitions and to expose product retrieval for devices.

In the future, Comviva will address requirements to complement the platform, such as inventory management for devices, set-top boxes, Fire TV Sticks and more.

TM Forum assets used

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