Vodafone goes live worldwide - with CoreMedia

The customer: Vodafone Group Plc

“We’re growing because we’re introducing new products. That means mobile television, mobile e-mail and music. We have to find a way to make it easier for our customers to do mobile work and play. This is something that people are willing to pay money for. Arun Sarin, Chief Executive of the Vodafone Group Pcl, is confident that his company is on the path to growth. As the world’s largest mobile communication services provider, Vodafone is active in forty countries. Around 60,000 employees deliver mobile communication services to more than 450 million customers.

The challenge: Global multimedia services of the third generation

For Vodafone (from “vo” = voice and “da” = data), innovative data services have been a strategic business segment, right from the company’s birth. Today, the company offers multimedia data services in 22 countries, via the Vodafone live! mobile phone portal. The service was launched in 2002 and today serves almost 31 million registered customers worldwide. Initially based on the second-generation GSM/GPRS network, Vodafone live! is now available as a third-generation (3G) service in many countries: by combining the mobile high speed data transfer rates of UMTS with internet-based services, Vodafone live! brings high quality, data rich 3G services to the mobile telephone. In 2005, 3.2 million Vodafone customers with UMTS-capable mobiles were already enjoying access to Vodafone live! 3G services.

Analysts expect that in the music industry alone, mobile downloads via 3G will account for 10% of total revenue by 2008. With Vodafone live!, Vodafone is seeking to exploit this potential. But how can this potential be monetized? How can the rights-holders be assured that their valuable premium content – music, images, movies, games and documents – will remain secure after they are offered on the Vodafone live! portal? What will be the technological basis for offering this content? After all, porting the entire range of services to UMTS and the internet protocol demands a fundamental reorganization of Vodafone’s IT infrastructure. This task is handled by Vodafone Global Services Platforms. The “OneVodafone” strategy stipulates that the IT services for all Vodafone services in each country be centrally hosted. This service delivery platform (SDP) is to be implemented step by step. It is to enable a range of different billing models for the purchase of music, videos, games and software – starting with simple downloads, for once-only or unlimited use, to multiple use downloads for consumption using mobile telephones, computers and/or in cars, to controlled sharing of downloads with friends (superdistribution). The back office has to be structured in such a way that rights owners can set up and manage the user rights to their digital products quickly and easily. As many UTMS mobile devices as possible should be able to access and use Vodafone live! content (interoperability). In other words: Vodafone needed future-proof and flexible components for building a globally accessible service delivery platform – with a high performance solution for digital rights management (DRM) as a core component. In order to achieve the greatest possible interoperability, Vodafone chose to follow the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM standards. The OMA is an association of 400 companies within the telecommunications industry. OMA DRM 1.0 represented the first generation of OMA’s independent digital rights management standards. The newest version, OMA DRM 2.0, now enables new business models that allow for the controlled sharing of data through superdistribution.

The solution: Perfectly individual, yet perfectly standard

In 2003, as part of the Global OMA DRM Trial, Vodafone took the initial step of inviting potential partners to use a test environment set up by Vodafone to test all the requirements of the technological infrastructure. CoreMedia demonstrated its DRM product at the Global OMA DRM Trial. In this comprehensive field test, CoreMedia’s innovative solutions performed so convincingly that in December 2004, Vodafone decided to implement CoreMedia DRM globally.

The first roll-out of CoreMedia DRM was for Vodafone Japan. Hitachi, the local implementation partner, set up the project in less than six months. For the following global roll-out, Vodafone Global Service Platforms enhanced the base product with a pre-integration customizing layer: a customization of the product to suit the specific requirements of the Vodafone infrastructure. The roll-out of the global Service Delivery Platform for Vodafone live! was significantly accelerated thanks to the “Baseline Integration” project model. The first launch took place in Great Britain, and then carried over into a total of thirteen countries.

The SDP components from CoreMedia support both the OMA DRM 1.0 and 2.0 standards, as well as those of Windows Media DRM. The software functions seamlessly with 400 mobile devices. This enables Vodafone to offer its customers a broad spectrum of content, include fast downloads of video clips, games and music in excellent quality. Mobile TV and the mobile games arcade are available, plus the “Personal HiFi”, thanks to fast downloads of high-quality full track music files.

CoreMedia DRM is based on Java, ODRL and XML – data formats that enable open interfaces and therefore a cost-efficient and scalable DRM solution that can adjust flexibly to varying business processes. CoreMedia DRM can provide consumers with multimedia content with different kinds of user rights. Downloads can be purchased with unlimited or limited user rights for consumption on a single end device; alternatively, downloads can be offered with rights for consumption on a controlled range of other digital devices (mobile phone, PC, iTV, MPEG player). By using an activation key, the consumer activates the rights she/he has purchased. This flexible system of user rights for frequency and location of consumption gives Vodafone new options for providing content, and enables a differentiated price structure. Thanks to CoreMedia DRM, Vodfone is the first mobile communications provider to enable users to share content, for an additional charge, with friends and acquaintances.

The back office of CoreMedia DRM can be adjusted to suit the technological infrastructure and interfaces of the rights owner. Music publishers, news agencies, games developers and all other providers of digital content are provided with a convenient interface, with which they can manage their content and their rights options.

Vodafone is looking forward to a successful future, because, thanks to CoreMedia DRM, the company is ideally position to exploit the global growth of mobile business.