Consumption Billing for an Internet Radio Streaming Company

About the Client

This is a case study of a company based in the US which provides hosting and internet streaming services. Their business model is to provide these services to Radio Stations so that these stations can avail the streaming service over the internet and reach more and more audience over the internet. They have about 400 Radio Stations as their customers.

The Challenge

The requirement was to measure the upstream and downstream transmission of content and charge each radio station as per their streaming consumption. The client required a billing mediation system which can be customised to meet this complex billing requirement and one on which they could rely on for automated billing ops. They needed a system that can cater to increasing loads with on-boarding of new accounts on their streaming platform.

The additional challenges stemmed from being able to support custom pricing rules and applying customer special pricing when needed. Also, customised invoice templates with branding and some specific changes in the invoice formats per customer accounts.

The Solution

The jBilling's billing mediation system fit the bill as it has been proven to be both flexible and robust billing mediation system. The jBilling system provides a customization framework which helps companies to extend the system functionally with relative ease and without affecting the core billing system.

jBilling On-premise deployment was used with:

The above diagram depicts the working of consumption billing implemented for this project. You can see multiple radio stations in the diagram streaming live content and audiences are shown connected to these stations over the internet. Each audience endpoint represents a streaming session with the radio station.

The client's hosting platform measures the consumption of bytes of data that a particular Radio Station is streaming upstream and downstream (considering audience at the other end). The streaming platform Internet Radio Hosting Platform in the diagram generates the UDR (Usage Data Record) files with the upstream bytes and downstream bytes recorded in each session for each Radio Station. The Usage Data Records are similar to Call Data Records (CDRs) in a Telecom system.

In jBilling, all the 400 Radio Stations were mapped as customers. The billing mediation engine from jBilling resolves each UDR record to be charged to a particular customer (i.e Radio Station). The consumption charges were being applied at either a predefined flat rate, or with tiered pricing or with customer specific special pricing. The pricing varied for each customer account, depending on the plan or based on the agreement with the customer for any special pricing, covering the discounts in some cases.

The Results

The bulk work of this implementation was to get the usage rating engine tested and certified for Production use. Once in Production, the system was stable in no time. The evaluation of the rating and charging was found to be accurate, in a very complex streaming environment.

This resulted in increased confidence of our client in providing their business offerings to more and more prospects. The ease with which the mediation rating solution could scale for greater UDR loads, opened up new business avenues for our client.