BOSTON – While Columbus Communications says it’s still growing its subscriber base at the rate of about 25% per year, so is not seeing the net subscriber losses many North American cable operators have, its Caribbean customers are still demanding the very same things those North American cable consumers want from their entertainment and communications: mobility.
The largest cable company in the Caribbean (most recently profiled here by Cartt.ca) used the 2012 Cable Show here in Boston to officially launch “Flow to Go”, a new service that lets its subscribers in Trinidad take their phone and television with them wherever they go (Columbus does business branded as Flow). “It seamlessly unifies voice, voicemail, video and soon, many other applications,” said Columbus CEO Brendan Paddick in a presentation at the conference’s Imagine Park on the show floor.
Powering the product is MINT, the Multiscreen Interaction Platform from Toronto’s UXP Systems (a company which Columbus is a 30% shareholder).
Paddick, pictured below with UXP CEO Gemini Waghmare on his right during the demo (thanks to The Cable Show for the photo) demonstrated how Flow to Go worked on both an iPad and iPhone (with further mobile OS support to come). A couple of the real keys, beyond letting customers take their phone number and TV anywhere, is that on the retail side, the company can now build personal relationships with everyone in each home – and on the administration side, MINT can interface with multiple billing systems, making integration simple.
“We’ve integrated a layer of personalization so that we now have a one-to-one relationship with each of our customers in the household,” said Paddick. “Up until now, it’s our opinion that only cellphone companies really knew who was using a device, because even five-six-seven-eight year old kids have cell phones now. But you don’t know who is using the TV, who’s sitting at the laptop in the kitchen, or who’s on the tablet.
“We think we’ve conquered that challenge and we’re now building a personal relationship with our customer base,” he added.
Paddick showed how in the Flow to Go communications dashboard each individual in a home could have their own personal account (complete with parental locks for the kids, if warranted). He pulled up a voice mail from his Trinidadian phone number and used the conference’s well-burdened WiFi network to bring in live TV fed from the Flow system in Port of Spain. He also used the Flow to Go system to make a live phone call as well. Social media integration is also on the near term horizon, as is rollout to Flow’s other regions like Jamaica, Curacao and Grenada.
“That didn’t cost me, as a Flow customer, one penny,” he said, after the call. “I take my devices with me, can connect to any (WiFi) network and I have basically eliminated the cell phone network – at least the minutes part of it.”
On the backend, Waghmare says the company is “breaking the household paradigm the MSO has – without breaking the underlying billing system.”
“The second thing we do is break the device paradigm, where the set top box orchestrates the video experience or the phone orchestrates a voice experience. We abstract that with a set of general utilities into, if you will, Columbus’s cloud. We can essentially provide to any service and to any IT or (back office billing or support) system the ability to deliver an orchestrated, unified experience to the individual – and we do it without breaking the backend systems.”
The Columbus launch is the first for UXP and thanks to non-disclosure agreements, UXP officials couldn’t say if the product is to be deployed in other cable systems, but confirmed it is being tested in the labs of a number of MSOs, including some in Canada.
