TM Forum: Monetizing the Metaverse Ecosystem
Telecomms industry group TMF is helping CSPs transform exploratory metaverse solutions into a viable and profitable ecosystem business across many industries.
At the high level the scale of the Metaverse opportunity is easily clear, representing a wholesale evolution of the Internet, to a highly advanced immersive environment that requires tremendous levels of compute and network capacity.
However for telcos tapping into this new business opportunity will require breakthroughs in technology, business model innovation, and ecosystem interactions.
With limitations in siloed platforms, minimal realistic use cases, a lack of VR technology adoption, and partnership complexities, there are numerous issues to overcome to take the metaverse to the mass market.
These immersive experiences should not solely focus on virtual reality but encompass the entire spectrum of extended reality. Users will expect diverse ways to safely access and interact within the metaverse, transcending multiple platforms and offering seamless connectivity tailored to their experiences.
Writing on Linkedin Boldizsár Pap of PwC explores some of the challenges of this interplay between VR technologies and telco capabilities, and the partner ecosystem opportunity for 5G and 6G services.
Huawei also explores some examples of Telcos adopting this approach, including SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, e&, KT Corp., Orange, NTT, China Mobile, Vodafone, Telefónica, Verizon, MTN and AT&T, and the different ways they have deployed services, including partnerships with each other as well as with Metaverse world providers.
Closing the Metaverse Chasm: Monetizing the Ecosystem
Always at the forefront of enabling telcos to understand, model and address new hyper-growth market opportunities, the TMF has an innovation accelerator focused on tackling these challenges, through their catalyst project: Closing the Metaverse Chasm: Monetizing the Ecosystem.
The goal of the project is to help CSPs adapt to any immersive experience, transforming exploratory metaverse solutions into a viable and profitable ecosystem business across many industries.
The project offers a powerful statement of work intended to enable CSPs to play a greater role in the metaverse value chain by bringing business model innovation and monetizing immersive partner services and social experiences, accessible to the mass-market, through the entire spectrum of extended reality:
- Metaverse-enabling existing use cases within the metaverse that bring additional value and have clear monetization potential.
- Expanding the metaverse’s reach beyond virtual reality with a multi-channel extended reality environment using blockchain-based secure ID and digital transactions.
- Automatically embedding connectivity into the immersive experience with dynamic feasibility checks to guarantee service quality.
- Showcasing new business models and monetization potential through social gamification and cross-platform loyalty.
- Assisting in curating communities of users across diverse metaverse platforms.
- Establishing an open and replicable metaverse foundation with zero-touch partnerships that can be applied to various use cases to optimize costs.
Speaking with the TM Forum Akash Mittal of EPAM explains the revenue opportunities for telecoms in the metaverse, how to build appropriate partner ecosystems and the actions telcos should take today to open those new monetization streams.
