Finland is well-known for the Santa Claus Village. Attracted by the land of a thousand lakes and the Northern Lights, countless visitors come to visit this country every year. No matter whether in a small wooden house deep in a snow covered forest in the mountains, or under a flickering street light, countless visitors in this fairy tale land impatiently share what they see and hear with friends and relatives. Unlike before, folks can share much more than simple images and words. Along with the upgrade that the Big Bang of mobile broadband speeds has brought the world, one small step has brought video on social media sharing platforms into the mainstream.

Video Brings Movement to Work and Daily Life

7:30, before leaving the house, she has a quick look at real-time road conditions, to know which routes are quickest to the office to meet her new colleagues.

9:30, she convenes remotely via videoconference with a group of specialists at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany, regarding the progress on a patient's diagnosis.

11:30, she simultaneously video chats with a nursery teacher while checking on her child in the daycare.

13:00, she sends her friend a short video of the hot air balloon ride she took in a city in Turkey, overlooking the entire city's beautiful scenery.

16:00, her mobile alerts her that someone has rang her doorbell. Using a remote monitoring system, she realizes it is just her neighbor paying her a visit.

20:00, after eating dinner with her whole family, she watches some TV in high definition with her parents via long distance video chat.

This is the portrayal of a day in the life of a Finnish surgeon named Jukki. These days, the average user does not need to change terminals for different purposes or frequently switch devices based on different usage scenarios. Only a mobile phone terminal is needed to set up a unified portal to integrate entertaining videos, cable TV, live broadcasts, and real-time monitoring and high-definition interaction; regardless of the type of media, video services can function anytime and anywhere. For Jukki, these changes have brought her enormous convenience.

Behind the Brand New Video Experience

These changes are merely the tip of the iceberg. The new video experience has made life convenient for users of Finnish operators like Elisa, according to the User Experience-Centric business concept. As Finland's native operator, Elisa serves around 4 million users. Compared with other major operators' comprehensive communications technology and service, Elisa devotes its attention to digitizing life and improving video experience for users.

In the context of fierce market competition and changing user requirements, Elisa insists on its own developmental concepts and proposes the following three policies:

Creating data value. In the mobile era, data is king. The rapid development of video content requires an explosive growth in data traffic. Particularly for people living away from their families, the immediate nature of being online and being connected to social networks has affected mainstream mobile life, with regard to the spread and manufacturing of mobile video content. According to statistics released by GlobalWebIndex, the largest organization for global digital consumer research, apps related to video content spread occupied the four most prominent positions among the top 10 most actively used smartphone apps in the world. In this light, Elisa has continuously increased its construction of network density and coverage, increasing user migration to 4G and improving the 4G service penetration rate, all while advocating real-time monitoring, videoconferencing, instantaneous sharing, and others. These uses have stimulated their demands for data traffic. Technological optimization and demand stimulation cause the value of video to double in data traffic operations.

Acceleration of new business services. Users' diverse content requirements from speech to text, and then to video, continually raise challenges for operators. Owing to its advantages in Finland's local market, Elisa rolled out new services specific to scenarios and content, and accelerated the use of these services online. In its present situation, Elisa has continuously promoted the popularity of its video services, particularly the use of its video monitoring system and videoconferencing. With regard to content, Elisa has cooperated with content providers, to focus on live sports broadcasting services. In addition, Elisa has guaranteed the evolution of future user requirements and their characteristics by upgrading video and cloud services to promote their high commercial value in the market.

Improvement of brand image and user experience. With the continuing upgrades of video service quality and growth in diversity, Elisa promotes the utmost importance of personal user experience. Considering that the unrestrained usage of traffic capacity means the ultimate experience for the user, Elisa therefore determines prices for an unlimited service package based on data rates, which has become the company's proudest business achievement. Otherwise, they have emphasized their focus on online services, from Online to Offline comprehensive user care, in order to consolidate local market brand leadership. In 2016, Elisa 4G subscribers grew 30.8%, average user mobile data traffic increased 96%, and single-SIM usage exceeded 10 GB, where the video traffic exceeded 70% of the total data traffic, far surpassing other European countries. More traffic consumption and a higher wireless network bearing percentage demonstrate their success in business strategies and also enhance user loyalty.

Video Services, Three Tactics to Achieve Traffic Monetization

Since 2010, Elisa's video services began to gradually develop and expand mobile scenarios to the family entertainment, television, and video monitoring sectors to form a set of all-encompassing video services. In reality, there is one question to answer: how can Elisa achieve traffic monetization and increase revenues? To resolve this problem, Elisa has formulated a three-dimensional tactic.

Training user habits to meet traffic requirements. In 2010, when Elisa first launched Elisa Mobile Video, its unlimited time and unlimited traffic self-operated OTT platform, mobiles, tablets, and other mobile devices were all supported. Based on self-made content and cooperation with content providers, Elisa integrates HBO Nordic, SF Kids, and live sports broadcasts. In 2012, Elisa launched Elisa Epic TV, a home television platform, reaching viewership of more than 25 million people, 400,000 fans on Google+, and 10 million Youtube users. After 2012, Elisa continued to launch video monitoring service platforms, such as Elisa Watch Live, providing 1280x760 high definition (HD) video services, and supporting various hand-held terminal devices. In the past few years, Elisa has accurately captured user video content and application scenario preferences, introducing heavy video content traffic in users' daily lives and becoming essential to user experience. According to a research report released by Tefficient, Finland has become the world's most mobile country, the majority of which is through Elisa's network transmissions. With the continuous increase in user experience with video, traffic will continuously increase with it. Elisa is prepared for changes in traffic conditions.

Diversified management service charges. To encourage traffic usage and consumption, Elisa provides a flexible charging management mode, using a service plan and terminal selection policy with unlimited traffic to construct profit points. On one hand, different application scenarios and network rates are classified using combination pricing. On the same 4G network, different rates are classified into common, Super, and Super+, while differentiating smartphones and home terminal application scenarios. On the other hand, this actively expands video industry applications. The Elisa Watch Live cloud service offers free app downloading of video monitoring, but for the remote monitoring camera, the traffic and number of cameras incurs monthly costs. Monthly camera upload traffic to the cloud can reach 145GB, where monthly storage fees are 9.9 euros.

Innovative network construction style. Along with the complexity of video service scenarios, Elisa's video service policies raised further challenges to network construction mode. When the user base increases and services are extensively used, Elisa cooperates with Huawei regarding network rate and traffic load analysis, requesting a network capability matching service plan, and establishes high density base stations offering sufficient capacity. Currently, Elisa's network density is already the world's highest, covering 98% of Finland's population. In addition to its 4.5G/5G-oriented network evolution strategy, Huawei has proposed the GigaRadio Macro evolution and upgrade, based on macro network planning for micro base stations to address traffic increase, matching Elisa's service requirements for the next 5 years.

Facing competition with numerous operators, Elisa has promptly adopted its video traffic requirements, service charge management, and network construction mode to new measures, and made breakthroughs in business achievements. In 2015, the Elisa wireless service revenue grew by 8%, profits increased by 9%, EBITDA increased by 3%, and 4G users accounted for almost 40% of users. Though market saturation occurred in Finland, Elisa still realized an increase in both revenue and profits. With respect to Elisa as a brand, its mobile service market share is continuously ranked as Finland's highest.Elisa CEO, Veli-Matti Mattila states: "On top of its operator business, Elisa offers plenty of new services, such as Elisa Viihde. Finland's most popular entertainment service with its own original series. We provide new services for corporate customers as well, for example Elisa Videra’s video collaboration services. In fact, 15% of our revenue comes from the new services such as these. And, the growth rate of these new services exceeds the growth of the traditional telecom services. Both 2014 and 2015, were the best fiscal years ever in Elisa’s history. We are not slowing down either, in the first quarter of 2016, mobile service revenue grew by 9%. The future looks very promising. The demand for both mobile and fixed data will continue to grow. Revenue from the new services will accelerate. And what else? Well, you'll just have to sit tight and see for yourself."