Canadian wireless carrier Telus has deployed Alcatel-Lucent’s new digital media store to support its ringtone, image and mobile gaming service offerings. 

Alcatel-Lucent’s digital media store service is providing Telus with a digital storefront for its multimedia offering, which includes applications, games, ringtones and wallpapers, to more than 7.9 million mobile and broadband Internet customers across Canada. The DMS service is designed to help fulfill consumers’ demand for access to their own content regardless of location, while giving carriers flexibility to implement business models appropriate to the local market.

“Mobile Internet drastically changed the way our customers access digital content,” said Chris Langdon, vice president of consumer products and services at Telus, Burnaby, BC, Canada.

“Alcatel-Lucent is offering the right solution for us to ensure that we can bring faster services our customers want, with a compelling and consistent consumer experience that makes discovering and using content fun and entertaining whether connected via Telus’ vast mobile network or broadband Internet,” he said.

Telus is a national telecommunications company in Canada that provides a wide range of communications products and services, including data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, entertainment and video.

Telus claims $9.6 billion of annual revenue and 12 million customer connections, including 6.7 million wireless subscribers.

Alcatel-Lucent is the trusted transformation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation and governments worldwide, providing services to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users.

Selling mobile content to subscribers
Telus publisizes its entertainment offering at http://www.telusmobility.com/music.

Alcatel-Lucent’s digital media store is an end-to-end managed and hosted service for multicontent stores that lets service providers such as Telus deliver content services more quickly with lower market and operational risk.

The new digital media store focuses on optimizing today’s traditional mobile content business while providing a foundation for quickly launching a wide range of new differentiated services including applications, ebooks, emagazines and video. 

DMS includes content relationships with content producers and aggregators focused on mobile applications, games, music and electronic publishing.

The DMS service automates the content lifecycle from content registration and population to the store to content management and publishing to marketing and delivery, regardless of content type.

Core to the DMS service is a merchandizing and analytics engine that easily supports focused marketing programs designed to increase revenues and customer loyalty, for example, bundles, subscriptions, personal locker, gifting, sharing of games, videos, music and applications.

The DMS service also comes with the ability to augment any portion of the service provider’s content team from content partner management and licensing to the storefront and promotions management.

DMS is also part of the publishing suite within the Alcatel-Lucent Developer Platform, which provides application programming interface management and developer tools to help service providers build their own developer programs and broaden their ecosystem of application developers.

“The DMS is a multiscreen solution across PCs, TVs and a whole range of mobile devices,” said Nora Maene, digital media marketing director at Alcatel-Lucent, Antwerp, Belgium. “Telus Canada is using the digital media store service for two screens, PCs and mobile devices—they’re not yet using it for IPTV.

“There are a lot of advantages for service providers—time to market is very short and the upfront investment is really limited, which is obviously a major advantage over training their own people and developing their own resources,” she said. “We specialize in optimizing their digital media service.

“It’s not just distribution—the marketing aspect is very important, and we have a set of tools that allows service providers to do smarter promotions and marketing.”

Final Take
Dan Butcher, associate editor, Mobile Commerce Daily