The Broadband Content Delivery Forum (BCDF)
The Broadband Content Delivery Forum (BCDF) was established to bring together experts and top players from across the industry to enhance and optimize the broadband subscribers' experience. The Forum is chartered with the development of a new broadband business model, meeting both technical and multi-players relationship demands, to rollout a new generation of innovative content services.
"The BCDF is a key step toward breaking open the high-bandwidth services market," said Tim Johnson, senior analyst with Ovum, an international research and consulting company. "Ovum estimates that Internet advertising and applications service revenues alone will be worth over US$20 billion worldwide in 2001. But the full development of content service revenues will depend on streamlining access and communications for the subscriber. If the BCDF helps to do that, it will deliver significant benefits for everybody involved with content services."
The European market has been and still is waiting for broadband content delivery. Broadband in Europe is on one hand the promise to stop charging for the ‘last-mile' and on the other hand it has the potential to service the numerous local language and cultural communities in Europe in a far more consumer oriented fashion than Internet is currently able to. This new forum should be able to accelerate the necessary standards - some key players in the European market are already members - Bertelsmann, British Telecom, Enron, BBC, Telstra etc.
"All of us should concentrate on our core competencies. What we need is a broadband alliance to make this new era happen, now. Bertelsmann will contribute with its leading knowledge in rich media content and applications to realize the convergence of television and Internet in a way that nobody has ever seen before," added Hardy Heine, executive vice president, Bertelsmann Broadband Group, Hamburg, Germany.
Who should join?
Anyone involved with leading software, caching and server vendors, MSOs, ILEC/CLEC, content developers, content delivery vendors, web hosting companies and ISPs. The BCDF is looking for organizations that are actively involved in the creation or delivery of broadband content.
"Nortel Networks initiated the creation of BCDF because we recognized that the evolving broadband Internet will be fundamentally different from the Internet as we know it today," said Anthony Alles, president and general manager, IP Services, Nortel Networks. "The Internet has historically been about ubiquitous connectivity, but tomorrow's high-performance Internet will be different. Customers want more than simple connectivity; they want the network to truly become `their world,' a place where they'll access personalized services, data, applications, and content - anywhere, anytime. In an era of free access, Internet services will drive the business case for broadband providers and soon, personalized services will be a multi-billion dollar industry. To realize the vision, today's industry leaders must come together to build tools and technologies, much as yesterday's leaders came together years ago, in bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to build the technologies of today's Internet. BCDF brings together fresh thinking and new perspectives to the mission of building the broadband business case."
If Service Providers simply deploy broadband services just like their current narrowband services, differentiated only by carrying a higher volume of the same traffic, then broadband services will themselves quickly become a low cost commodity. Instead, Service Providers need to deploy services that will allow them increase revenues and margins as well as customer loyalty. This requires a new class of intelligent broadband services targeted at the burgeoning requirements for video conferencing, multi-media delivery, and managed applications.
http://www.bcdforum.org/