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.