IMPROVING THE TAKE RATE OF REAL TIME SHARE SERVICES

We take many things on faith, or belief, or just because we have been told that it has been so for a long time. Or perhaps we were exposed to it when we were all young. Everyone who has attended school learns the arithmetical fact that "minus times minus is plus." And yet extremely few people know the reasoning behind this rule. Why do we think it is true? I have asked high school mathematics tutors and they suddenly discover they are late for an appointment. W. H. Auden even wrote a couplet that goes:

Minus times minus is plus
The reasons for this we need not discuss

What does this have to do with Video Share, the new wireless service being offered by certain mobile carriers, you ask? Just that everyone who first hears of this service assumes that it will catch on like fire. That it will be the next new "hot" thing. And yet the few times that it has actually been offered to the public, the take rates have been less than impressive. The only shorter lines in town have been of people who have refused bailout funds.

Those of you who know this service will recall that it enables a telephone caller to add one-way video to an ongoing call using the builtin camera in the handset. The party receiving the call then sees ("See What I See" was the original name of the service) what the other party is showing on their handset display screen. So the voice conversation can be annotated with a live video feed. And, as I said above, everyone who first hears about this service thinks that it will be more popular than Obama in a certain village in Kenya. And yet, no one seems to know why the public isn't clamoring for the service.

The simple answer is that the architectures being used to deploy Video Share inhibit call completion in many situations. The conditions under which a normal telephone call can be up-converted to a video share call are just too onerous as the service is being rolled out today. The caller and receiving party both need to be in 3G UMTS coverage, both need to be subscribers of the service with the same carrier, both need to have compatible handsets loaded with the proper clients. The number of subscribers represented by these conjunctive intersections is very small in any new launch. Consequently, after a subscriber has tried it and failed a few times, they never try again.

To put it in somewaht different terms, the current Video Share architectures seem to be ignorant of Metcalfe's Law, viz., that the value of a network increases super-linearly (let us not debate whether it is O(n^2) or O(log n)) with compatible end points.

The way around this problem is equally simple. The number of opportunities to up-convert a voice call need to be increased. And this can be done by adding a server into the call that allows most up-conversion attempts to succeed. If the receiving party is not in coverage, or does not have appropriate UMTS coverage, or incompatible handset then the server acts as a proxy for the receiving handset and stores the video feed, making it available to the receiver (and any other authorized subscriber) at a later time, or immediately via a PC interface. The video feed can be directed to an IP-enabled TV or display screen in close proximity to the receiver. Thus, not only more up-conversion attempts will succeed, receivers who are not subscribed to the service will be tempted to do so in a viral manner. Various organizations including GSM Association and RCS (Rich Communication Services) have recognized this reality and are looking to incorporate a server-based architecture for share services.

The other obvious advantage of this proposal would be that the server would allow inter-connections between the calling mobile and social friends of the caller on social networking sites, thus increasing the number of compatible endpoints even more.

Real time, peer to peer implementations of share services will suffer from coverage and handset compatibility problems. The take rate of these services can be increased by adding a server to the call model.

This brings me back to the connection with "minus times minus is plus." This rule in inextricably linked with the law of distributivity of multiplication. You can not have one or the other. Both provide support and bolster each other. And that, gentle reader, was the point with share services and their relationship to application servers.