BitDepth#1373

MARK LYNDERSAY

THE Telecommunications Authority (TATT) published its new discussion paper on the issue of over the top (OTT) services at the end of August.

The new paper reframes a contentious top-level discussion about OTTs that's been going on since 2015.

Early discussions about the impact of these services were prompted by the burgeoning success of new voice over IP services like Viber and WhatsApp that were just beginning to take a chunk out of the incomes of local telecommunications providers.

In its newest iteration of this running discussion, TATT describes an OTT as a "content, service or application, accessed by the public via the internet, that may be a direct substitute for, and/or may compete with a public telecommunications and/or broadcasting service."

Today, this describes almost everything that people use with any regularity on the public internet, and over the past seven years, most connected users have become quite comfortable with accessing alternative services using internet protocols.

In the face of increasingly entrenched expectations, TATT is forging ahead with plans for both short-term and long-term regulation of OTTs using existing legislation and developing international law as a guide with a view to proposing amendments to local law to regulate these services.

With the market for OTT media services pegged at US$121 billion, there is an increasing expectation that these services should contribute to the infrastructure expansion that is undertaken to accommodate it.

Why would TATT want to regulate OTT services?

OTT services use existing telecommunications infrastructure at a rate that few providers might have anticipated.

During covid19 lockdowns, for instance, video conferencing surged dramatically with a commensurate demand on service providers, and streaming video has been using increasing bandwidth.

TATT does not report on the penetration of OTT services, but some idea of the scope of that use can be inferred from its impact on the numbers that the authority does report.

For instance, between 2012 and 2020, according to TATT's 2021 annual report, total internet subscriptions doubled from 646,000 to 1,147,000.

In that time, revenue from outgoing long distance calls dropped from $263.5 million to $58.5 million.

PayTV subscriptions rose slowly during that time, rising from 198,700 to just 242,400.

It's worth noting that Netflix, the first major streaming provider to officially offer its product to the TT market, announced availability in 2011.

Estimates of broadband use on local networks by the streamer in recent years have ranged from 50 per cent to as much as 80 per cent of bandwidth in use.

Netflix does not break out the Caribbean in its reporting for the Latin American region, but the region accounts for roughly 35 per cent of the company's subscriber base, but delivers a growth rate of only one per cent. Europ