ZTE Brings New Home Video Services to Türk Telekom Subscribers

Turkey, officially known as the Republic of Türkiye, is a transcontinental Eurasian country with a unique geographic position and a rich culture. The country has a total population of 80 million, with a significant proportion of young people. Türk Telekom, the largest integrated telecom operator, dominates the fixed-line market in Turkey, possessing 90% of the country's fiber resources and growing fast in digital services.

In 2020, ZTE began to build a customized end-to-end TV platform for Türk Telekom, and efficiently completed the migration of one million subscribers to the live network within only a year. This migration resulted in a 9.5% increase of the average revenue per user (ARPU) of Türk Telekom's TV bundles. Türk Telekom speaks highly of ZTE's video products.

Türk Telekom and ZTE Collaborate to Enhance TV Experience

ZTE and Türk Telekom have been collaborating since 2011 in sectors such as fixed network and core network. In 2017, ZTE recognized that Türk Telekom's TV services were lagging in service experience and had high costs of operation, maintenance and customization, impacting the competitiveness of the service in the local market. After several meetings and visits, ZTE identified several key issues with Türk Telekom's TV services, including unstable time-shifted TV functions, slow live channel switching, and a slow response of the electronic program guide (EPG). These problems seriously affected the end-user experience and hindered Türk Telekom's ability to launch innovative video solutions and increase ARPU.

To tackle these problems, ZTE quickly offered Türk Telekom an end-to-end solution based on its Big Video products. However, in 2018, due to the financial market fluctuations in Turkey, Türk Telekom did not make a decision on the project at that time.

In 2019, Türk Telekom re-launched the TV project and issued an invitation to tender.

ZTE promptly held a video product workshop specifically for the operator, and formed a team comprising experts from various fields to cater to the requirements in the tender.

Compared to the old platform, ZTE's solution has introduced new features in five aspects: a private cloud container solution architecture; over 1,000 customized functions and interconnection with over 10 third parties; customized migration solution to release operator BOSS development workload; brand-new operation solution with a sales promotion system and targeted advertising solution to improve the operator's revenue; and B2B wholesale functions to explore new business models for the operator.

Despite the impact of the pandemic, in May 2020, ZTE's TV project team successfully performed a proof of concept (POC) with approximately 1,000 items. The team set a testing center in Nanjing and held a video conference with Türk Telekom's team. Experts in Turkey, Spain and Serbia participated online in the testing and provided explanations. Through seven days of joint efforts, ZTE successfully completed the testing and convincingly demonstrated its client design, platform service management, and operation and maintenance (O&M) capabilities to the customer. The efficient testing arrangement also showcased ZTE's project management capability. Türk Telekom highly recognized ZTE's solution, and in the autumn of 2020, ZTE was selected for the video project.

The Success of Project Delivery and Migration

Türk Telekom has high requirements for project delivery and customization. As a world-leading provider of video solutions, ZTE provided an advanced video solution — Premium Video Platform (PVP) 2.0 — tailored to Türk Telekom's specific needs. With this solution, Türk Telekom's project achieved the fastest delivery among platform replacement projects of similar scale in the global IPTV sector.

During the solution design phase, ZTE designed a system capable of supporting 2 million IPTV subscribers and 5 million OTT subscribers, based on Turkey's subscriber growth potential. This solution provided access to over 10 types of terminals, including mobile phones, PCs, and smart TVs.

ZTE successfully conducted the research on platform deployment, developed a migration solution, cut over data from the original platform, and migrated the STBs and OTT clients to the new platform. By June 2022, all 1.75 million subscribers on Türk Telekom's TV platform were able to enjoy the new services, which included an elegant UI interaction, personalized content service, and smooth synchronization across different terminals.

Throughout the project delivery process, ZTE collaborated closely with Türk Telekom, establishing four teams focusing on different aspects of the project including client, CDN, service platform, and big data. The project had a delivery staff of over 100, with more than 20 located in Turkey. Each sub-module team had its own project manager, engineering group, R&D group, and testing group, creating a stable team structure.

To accelerate project progress, ZTE implemented a full project delivery procedure, involving collecting customer needs, initiating reviews, solution review, testing, task assignment review, staging platform testing, and ultimately delivering the production platform. By employing efficient project management solutions, ZTE aligned closely with Türk Telekom's requirements. The sub-module teams held meetings two or three times a week with the customer's technical leaders to clarify requirements and provide progress reports. This allowed for prompt detection of any problems or missing information, facilitating resources allocation for problem solving. The project staff in Turkey and ZTE's R&D headquarters arranged daily meetings both respectively and jointly to improve project transparency and address any bottlenecks efficiently. ZTE maintained comprehensive project archives including meeting records, discussions and technical documents to ensure traceability.

ZTE addressed Türk Telekom's requirements for CDN, client, service platform, big data, and migration from signing the project to its delivery by providing suitable solutions. ZTE also introduced services like big data analysis and processing, marketing strategy generation and release (including sales promotion and discounts), and advertising management, while actively embracing Google ecosystem to enable ARPU uplift for the operator. In terms of maintenance, ZTE provided customized migration tools, in-service software upgrades, CDN management platforms, and content multi-DRM encryption to facilitate smooth O&M for the operator.

The migration was difficult as the operator chose to keep existing set-top boxes (STBs) from four different vendors. ZTE designed different migration solutions based on the performance and brands of STBs. To reduce the extra BOSS interconnection workload for the operator during video platform migration, ZTE developed custom migration tools to synchronize and migrate user data, content data, and call detail record (CDR) data between the old and new platforms. ZTE also implemented customized rollback and backup redundancy mechanism to maximize data security and guarantee customer experience. With the help of these migration tools, all the subscribers were successfully migrated to ZTE's new platform.

Conclusion

In November 2022, ZTE's video platform passed the pre-acceptance test (PAC) by Türk Telekom. The two parties celebrated this success together and confirmed video services as a key strategic service for further development.

With the successful commercial deployment of TV services, ZTE will support Türk Telekom in the refined operation of content services. By deploying a new video platform, ZTE will collaborate with Türk Telekom to explore innovative services such as smart venue and VR. Moreover, ZTE will help Türk Telekom further implement wholesale and B2B CDN solutions, enabling them to explore new business models in more industries.