But the consumer wasn’t really good at describing the symptoms of a technical issue. And not only did the helpdesk not have visibility into the home, they did not have the right tools to help the consumer to help diagnose and troubleshoot. The helpdesk operator could ask the customer to do a few minor things such as plug and unplug the device. If that didn’t work, they had to send out a technician to the door. So you’ve already got a bad experience being made worse. As a result of these inefficient processes we’ve estimated that approximately 20 percent of digital video revenues were actually being spent on managing and supporting customers.

We also noticed that for those providers in the early days of their service that these issues were acting as a bottleneck, so they were not able to bring new customers on as quick. So these issues were having topline and bottom line impact in these businesses.

We knew that we had technology that we could apply, that would help both the topline marketers, and the bottom line people that deal with the customers. We shared those metrics with our telco companies, and immediately we had an eye- popping response! No-one was really thinking about managing the service. We found that no-one was really looking at this within the companies.

We knew that those metrics were not something that was limited to cable, that they were also being replicated in the early days of IPTV. Since then we’ve gone out and talked to satellite providers and found the same issues with them. It proved that these support problems were a harbinger of things to come for telcos providing video services.

Our biggest obstacle to date has been due to the reality that organisations are primarily focusing on the network and not really thinking about or planning their strategy around consumer-side service management. Everybody forgets the early days of DSL, when the emphasis was on the network, and the product could be a bit of a mess when it got to the consumer. What we are saying to telcos is "take the management system and build it into the product."

In such a competitive environment, where you’ve got cable going aggressively at the core services the telcos provide, they have to find a way to fight back for pure survival. There’s so much at stake with the customer experience with IPTV, and they’ve got to get that nailed straight out of the gate. TV is such an emotional service, and the telcos have not previously had to deal with this. For most people, if your internet goes down and you can’t get the score of a cricket match online, you’ll manage. If TV goes down, boy you’re going to be upset!