The TM Forum, a cross between a trade association and standards body, realized that as convergence was becoming more of a reality, the telcos would have to expand their ecosystems to welcome the content companies into the mix. The result of this realization was the Content Encounter, which went public in November of last year. Shown as a demo at trade shows, the technology is actually designed to develop a content ecosystem that is, to date, not yet ready for public use.

Jim Warner, vice chairman and head of the content and media sector, said it would most likely take two or more years to feel like the TM Forum has really made a significant contribution in creating a unified approach to content delivery. The TM Forum, which is demonstrating the Counter Encounter at the NAB Show this week, will launch phase two of the system at the Management World 2008 show in May in Nice, France.

“We use Content Encounter as a vehicle to bring two industries together,” Warner said in an NAB interview. “Telcos don’t understand content providers’ problems. We are bringing those two together to solve them jointly and allow content to flow seamlessly from creation to delivery.”

The Counter Encounter involves a three-stage process that takes content from creation to consumption. Using video and real-time news, weather and traffic feeds from provider Westwood One, the content is passed from Westwood to an aggregator environment (in this case, IBM’s Media Hub) to the service provider environment. At this stage, content is bundled, priced and personalized including billing setup and service package integration via Motorola’s Leapstone technology. Lastly, the content is delivered to the TV, PC and mobile screen, where it can be stopped, started and transferred between screens. Using standards, this process can potentially be done with thousands of trading partners, Warner said.

At an NAB panel, Lee Chow, director of video products management for AT&T, said that the telco giant was in the middle of an evolution in which the customer is at the center of the digital lifestyle. She stressed the operator’s commitment to convergence and a three-screen strategy through collaborative work with the TM Forum. AT&T’s aim is to evolve into a communications and entertainment company — not focused on the bundle, but intended to deliver to customers a tightly integrated set of features across AT&T’s portfolio of services, Chow said.

“Take, for example, a customer with quad-play; we will uniquely offer caller ID across their TV or mobility access across their TV EPG and DVR functionality,” she said, adding that AT&T anticipates having more than 1 million customers to provide this type of service to via U-verse by the end of the year.

“Our vision would be to allow our customers to sample, browse, purchase and consume a myriad of content ubiquitously across the mobile portal and any device,” Chow added.

Matt Milford, fellow and director of business development at Motorola, noted that telcos are basically transforming themselves into virtual merchandisers, using content commerce interfaces for discovery of content from different content providers. The content commerce interface is not just digital either. Milford envisions physical uses for it as well, such as a coupon for dinner out or a movie streamed to the home.

“Content in the digital form can be pervasive, but we are also combining now items of physical things,” he said. “You buy the sports package; you get a football. There is a whole progression of things we want to do within the TMF to support not only digital commerce, but also physical.”

Cognizant, a global IT and business processing company, is also an active participant with the Content Encounter platform. Bill Howard, digital media solutions lead at Cognizant, told attendees that the industry is in a time of change for everyone involved in the supply chain, marked by a new paradigm for media relationships, not the same old business relationships.

“We are really talking about a vision,” Howard said. “We know where we are today. Everyone has been involved with some aspects of delivering services. The vision now depends on who you are; the content owners have one vision, aggregators have a different view, carriers have a view, consumer electronics producers have a view and the view that counts the most — the consumer view. How do you balance all that?”

The answer, he said, lies in standardizing the interface for content consumption and improvements in metadata. Billing and settlements will also be crucial to the whole process because all members of the ecosystem are ultimately in the business to make money, he said. The TM Forum, along with its member partners, hopes to solve this problem and attract more members into the fold.

The TM Forum is in the process of bringing IP providers into the value chain to make them active partners in enabling the different players. Whether from the Internet space, ad world, device world, media content world or telecom world, they can work in a neutral playing field where all parties involved can monetize their content, Warner said. This includes pushing standards to a broad set of providers, not just the participants in the Content Encounter. This is the next challenge the forum faces going forward.

“The work in there, while it is good, probably could not be used by anyone except the people that are involved,” Warner said at an NAB panel discussion. “How do we take a section of the team and get them to work on cleaning it up, pushing it and making the specs available for others? TMF knows how to do that; we just have to figure out who has the interest in doing that kind of work.”