Multimedia Services Offer Mixing Telco and Internet Assets

Abstract

Traditionally, Internet has offered multimedia services independently of the services offered by companies associated to Telco (companies that traditionally offer telephony and associated services). In the last years, the technical community has assumed that the convergence of both worlds is a fact; however, there are many barriers to be removed. On one hand the emergence of cloud computing technologies will change the way of providing multimedia services. On the other hand economic issues are very important in this convergence process. In this chapter we describe how multimedia services are offered from Internet and the Telco. The convergence of Web 2.0 and Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem on the WIMS 2.0 initiative focuses on creating value for Internet and Telco and making multimedia services a reality for end users, independent of the underlying environment. We propose a novel strategy that uses cloud computing to facilitate the development and deployment of converged multimedia services. We also observe a sustainable business model accompanying the converged proposals to offer innovative multimedia services.