Toward a new Telco role in future content distribution services

In the recent years the following two trends have been accelerated: on the one hand, as Content Services became at the center of Internet usages, OTTs strengthen their position. On the other hand, in several cases, Telcos are seeing their role shrinking to “dumb pipes” providers. This paper introduces advanced Telcos' positioning in future content distribution services. In particular, it focuses on the “value” that Telcos can bring to CDN providers and Content providers and analyses the required evolutions of the involved systems' architectures (network and content delivery). Value is assessed with respect to both users' trends and content ecosystem evolution. We show that existing Telcos' assets could indeed be leveraged to make the proposed move, bringing to Telcos a major differentiator in this arena. For that, an open and efficient control infrastructure is necessary, the paper presents the core required functionalities and architectural framework, as well as related challenges.