Service to Places, Devices and Accounts: What's at Stake

Telecom and video entertainment services were traditionally tied to a specific location. Mobile services are different, always representing services to a person or single device, no matter how services are billed. In the future we will also see "untethered" devices that are connected using the mobile network, but are not mobile in character.

Increasingly, we are seeing the development of overlapping connections, some that are fixed, some fully mobile, some untethered. We also are starting to see untethered applications and services. "TV Everywhere" provides an example. The billing arrangement focuses on place-based delivery of video, but TV Everywhere adds nomadic access, sometimes only within the subscriber's home.

In the future, TV Everywhere access is likely to extend to much-wider areas, perhaps a whole country at first. Sling services obviously allow access to a consumer's at-home video services at any location.

Mobile devices including smart phones, feature phones, iPod Touch devices sometimes use both mobile network connections and Wi-Fi, in a variety of modes. Sometimes the devices are fully mobile, other times untethered, sometimes as a virtual substitute for a "fixed" connection.

Over time, service providers will experiment with and then introduce different packages of service that bridge the "service to a location" and "service to a person or device" modes. In part, that might mean a bundle including both fixed and mobile services on a single account. In other cases it will mean a variety of devices and services used by a household or group of users, fixed and mobile.

It isn't clear how those changes will affect the U.S. consumer services market, which the Yankee Group puts at $215.8 billion a year just for consumer voice and video services. At the moment, voice and video make up 76 percent of the total spent on telecom and network-based entertainment services by U.S. consumers.