SingTel, one of Asia’s largest telcos, is working on a possible long-form mobile video platform that could launch in the second half of the year, leveraging its reach, billing relationships and customer knowledge via associates across India and Southeast Asia.

“There is an opportunity for us to come up with a simple, easy-to-use product at an affordable price, targeted at people on smartphones, that goes beyond the snacking experience,” said longstanding SingTel executive Allen Lew, speaking in an on-stage discussion during APOS 2014.

“This is something that my team is looking at very carefully – we are having discussions with content providers,” added Lew, CEO of SingTel's media and consumer services unit Group Digital Life as well as chief country officer for the telco's home market, Singapore.

Digital Life was set up to find new ways to engage SingTel’s customers as mobile penetration nears saturation, Lew explained.

“Once we have the mobile internet, the game tends to change quite significantly,” he said.

“A telco, if they use their assets well, can play a very important role in this entertainment ecosystem, by providing different types of content to our customers.”

Gateway To The Mobile Internet 

While the unit is also exploring mobile advertising and location-based services, video is the best gateway to drive uptake of mobile services, as something people already know well, Lew reasoned.

SingTel has started road-testing short-form video consumption for feature phone owners in India and Indonesia (with more Southeast Asian growth markets to follow) via investee company Vuclip.

Focused on emerging markets, Vuclip works with telcos to aggregate content and optimize mobile video streaming.

The next step is providing a more immersive, long-form service for smartphones.

Although only about 10% of SingTel’s broader subs base (including associates) use smartphones today, this market should gain scale in India and Southeast Asia as handset prices fall.

At the same time, emerging mobile broadcast technology (such as LTE Broadcast, which SingTel will trial later this year), should improve mobile delivery for live video.

“The bandwidth is there,” Lew says. “At SingTel, we are looking three to four years out.”

Lew also feels SingTel can gain an edge by developing expertize in video search and discovery, key elements of the user experience in mobile video, a more personalized way to watch TV.

“We will be investing a large amount of our financial resources in developing a data analytics and artificial intelligence capability, to create metadata for content a lot better than anybody has done before,” he said.

Metadata are tags used to find and surface files in digital databases.

“The ability to come up with a unique video search engine, something that is personalized and targets content in a much cleverer way, will create a differentiation and competitive advantage for us,” he added.

As a 150-year-old telco, SingTel is more adept at connecting people than engaging them, Lew noted.

Nonetheless the company has been learning the ropes of the content business, sometimes the hard way, most recently via its five-year-old IPTV service in Singapore, Mio TV.

There is more to learn, Lew continued, but this foray has taken SingTel into some key areas for future mobile video development, including program production as well as how people interact with their TVs using mobile devices.

“Stage one, in terms of the experience, is there,” he said. “The important thing now is: how do we scale up, and use the reach that we have to get to scale?

"At the end of the day, the content business has huge fixed costs. For us to get to scale and amortize these fixed costs is very important.”