Virtual reality (VR) allows you to be transported to real or imagined locations instantly and can connect you to people all over the world. VR users hit 50 million in 2016 and the number of active users of VR is forecast to reach 171 million by 2018. The graph below shows how revenue has grown and is predicted to grow over the next few years. 360-degree video is already available on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook and continued investment from these companies and others including Google and Microsoft mean that VR technology is becoming more affordable every day.

Source: Superdata

The technology is set to transform a number of industries and affect on the way we work and interact with the world and each other. Developments in VR mean that live events such as concerts or sports games can be experienced from your sofa. A global audience can be reached from one venue with the help of a few cameras and some technology. Users can access live streams through VR headsets but also through their browser or mobile app.

A seamless experience

To create a 360-degree video, visual data from multiple cameras must be pieced together to create one video. Post-production of VR content begins with stitching and blending to create one seamless sphere of visual content. VR has continued to improve since its conception and now features immersive effects such as audio that matches the user’s visual experience so accurately that when a user looks away from something, the audio diminishes. Recording using binaural sound is key to this feeling of ‘presence’. For a successful VR experience, and a feeling of true presence, the stitching technology used to create the 360-degree environment must be of a high enough quality to produce a seamless experience.

The future of VR

Tech leaders are predicting that VR will compete with television in the future and are investing in livestreaming services that aim to distribute 360-degree VR content to users around the globe. Just as the internet has changed the way we consume media such as news articles, VR is expected to do the same to television. This entertainment value could be seen as a key area of investment for telcos looking to create a new revenue source after the decline in growth from voice, texts and, most recently, data.

Industry specialists such as CNET founder Halsey Minor believe that VR will be the next stage of growth for the content industry, while Goldman Sachs have stated that VR and AR have the potential to become the next big computing platform. Goldman Sachs have outlined their predictions for VR and AR use in 2025, which can be seen in the graph below. The World Economic Forum sees AR and VR as technologies that can transform daily life with their time and cost saving benefits. This growing industry should be capitalised on by any telco wishing to stay relevant in the future.

Goldman Sachs predictions for VR and AR use in 2025

An example of a telco that is investing in VR is SK Telecom, which is commercialising its 360-degree VR live broadcasting capabilities and planning to open its application programming interface (API) so that individuals and small content developers can create their own 360-degree live VR experiences.

At this stage, the development of VR is very experimental as challenges are identified and overcome. Poor internet speeds can impact the VR experience through heavily compressed images and the strain that VR will put on networks is an area of concern. Network capacity needs to be an area of investment, particularly at the user end of the journey, as VR requires around five times more bandwidth than HDTV as well as the low latency that is essential for a fully immersive experience. If users do not have the correct requirements, content will need to buffer and be stored locally  – creating delays and limiting the interaction capabilities of the VR experience.

The next steps for VR will take the experience mobile. Immersive live VR broadcasting will work in tandem and become more widespread with the development of 5G due to the large bandwidth and low latency that are required for streaming. Network providers will play a key role in the realisation of VR, ensuring high quality connections to allow for a seamless immersive experience.

With the countdown to the MiFID II regulations on the financial sector within the EU continuing apace – we take a look at the APAC call recording regulations that have been put in place since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007.

Eleven members of the G20 summit, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have committed to a host of regulations for their banks. The aim of these regulations is to improve transparency in the financial industries and reduce risk culture. These measures should restore the trust in investors and consumers that may have been lost in recent years.

With MiFID II mandating the recording of all mobile calls and text messages relating to financial advice and wealth management, it is unsurprising that Asia-Pacific should follow suit with its own extensive regulations.

Burden of proof

Although there is not a cohesive set of compliance guidelines for the region, the unifying theme of the regulations is financial services providers acting in the best interests of their consumers.

The Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) Act introduced by the Australian government, designed to nurture trust in customers and encourage transparency in financial service providers, states that financial advisors must act in the best interests of their clients. Best practice guidelines released by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission describe how records should be kept to show how this is being upheld. In order to comply with these guidelines, all communications with clients will need to be captured and stored securely.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority also requires that institutions selling investment products maintain adequate records to demonstrate that they have advised their clients appropriately – this includes audio recording. Where repeated transactions are requested over the phone, these calls must be recorded to prove that customers are aware of any continued risks before continuing with their investments. Any waivers of risk disclosure should also be recorded as evidence.

Chart from Nielsen Q4 2016 Consumer Confidence Report

Similarly, the Chinese Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests Amendment places the burden of proof on service providers in the event of a dispute. Chinese and Hong Kong banks, are also required to keep records of client communications, including audio recordings, in all derivatives transactions. These must be kept readily accessible for a minimum of five years after the transaction has matured or been terminated. The Nielsen Consumer Confidence Index (see chart above) shows that Chinese consumer confidence has increased in Q4 of 2016, which shows promising signs for the new regulations.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, in its guidelines on risk management practices, states that institutions should maintain records of telephone calls involving trades and discussions with customers on proposed transactions. Transaction information should be stored ‘in a manner that is reasonably practicable to retrieve’ until at least five years after the last date of expiry or termination of a contract. Storage for this length of time tends to be a major challenge for legacy call recording solutions, especially as financial organisations grow. The costs involved can increase dramatically with the storage requirements. With a native cloud solution, scalability is built into the service – allowing organisations to manage their data without any extra hardware.

Chart from World Economic Forum

It’s not all doom and gloom

As regulations and guidelines around financial services tighten to protect taxpayers and consumers, technology providers strive to innovate solutions to help organisations along this road. For instance we have seen solutions such as Dubber working with service providers to provide finance-focused call recording solutions to overcome these challenges.

Solutions such as Dubber’s native cloud call recording will be an instrumental service for organisations wishing to comply with these guidelines. Just like the paper trail of emails, it provides proof that specific information was supplied to a client, ensuring advice was given in their best interest. Not only is the implementation of this service quick and easy, there are numerous commercial benefits that accompany it.

Keeping customer service and user experience at the forefront of your business strategy is vital for success, and there is no reason that this shouldn’t be the case when maintaining compliance with regulations. The systems that have been put in place by financial authorities to maintain consumer interests can actually help banks to identify consumer behaviour patterns that can help them to understand their customers and improve their business.

Safe storage that is easily accessible, is something that you can expect from native cloud solutions. Without the need for any hardware, Dubber can provide long-term secure storage for your calls, which can be accessed in a flash. Solutions such as Dubber’s platform offering, which utilise third party infrastructure as a service solutions such as Amazon Web Services, experience vast benefits such as scalable storage and enhanced cloud security.  Prioritising security is all part of the AWS cloud infrastructure, which is constantly evolving to protect your data.

“The cloud is a principal, not a software version”

– GovSense

The internet is full of companies labelling themselves as a “cloud based solution”. Unfortunately, not all of these are true cloud products, but what have been nicknamed ‘fake’ cloud products. There are two forms of cloud based platforms from which companies deploy their technology solutions: hosted cloud platforms and true or native cloud platforms. Many companies who claim to be cloud based are often actually operating from a hosted cloud platform, which is both less efficient and less functional than true cloud based offerings. In fact, hosted cloud solutions sometimes simply add to the plethora of problems that accompany on-premise solutions.

A hosted cloud solution is a technology service offered by providers that host physical servers which actually defer the service elsewhere. Hardware is still required, which means that the solutions are not truly cloud based solutions, and are unable to be scalable – a feature that is one of the key attractions of native cloud solutions. Hosted cloud solutions are not built, maintained or managed by the provider themselves, as they are usually off-the-shelf products. Instead, they shift accountability to others, which causes the usual complications of third party involvement. Amongst other things, this creates a barrier between users and their data.

A true cloud solution is operated entirely from a native cloud platform, eliminating any need for hardware. Once hardware requirements are eliminated, the associated restraints of using hardware are simply eliminated as well. End users can benefit from efficient solutions without the need for any hardware, and the associated headaches. True cloud solutions can therefore provide best in the industry services. The list of benefits of true cloud platforms is extensive, and includes:

• Seamless integration into any application
• Unlimited scalability
• Open APIs – giving users the flexibility to adapt solutions to fit their requirements
• No tedious upgrade processes
• Speed and ease of use
• Greater value for money
• Highly secure
• Highly accessible
• Many others

Undoubtedly, the most significant benefit of true cloud platforms is their capacity for unlimited scalability, which enables end users to scale the processing power and storage capacity of solutions to fit their individual requirements. True cloud solutions have been built securely to perform in a multi-tenant cloud environment.They therefore support multi-tenancy, as well as data redundancy. They are often deployed with open APIs, providing users the flexibility to adapt the solution to fit their individual requirements. This agility perfectly compliments the dynamic and constantly changing demands of the modern world. In all these ways and more, true cloud solutions differ from hosted cloud solutions. Hosted cloud solutions are simply attempting to blur the lines between true and hosted platforms.

“Connecting an internal solution to the web and calling it ‘cloud’ is a bit like waterproofing a truck and calling it a submarine: it might technically fit the description, but it’s clearly not meant for that.”

– IT News Africa

The long list of applications and benefits that true cloud solutions offer simply cannot be matched by hosted cloud solutions, and so true cloud solutions are better equipped to help companies provide best in the industry solutions for their clients. The leading true cloud platforms are Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Two notable examples of companies using these platforms to deploy their service include Netflix and Spotify. AWS enables Netflix to rapidly deploy data content on an enormous scale, to servers all over the world. It is AWS that enable Netflix to manage their huge user base and volume of data. Spotify use Google’s Cloud Platform to host their data centre, having opted to focus on data user queries to provide the best possible user experience. The Google Cloud Platform enables Spotify to scale their service to fit their popularity, and to answer user queries within seconds, by hosting their data centre on their scalable and secure platform.

In an increasingly tech-heavy world, a company’s reputation and ability to stand out from substantial competition is vital to its success, and providing best in industry solutions is the best way to secure a good reputation. True cloud platforms enable companies to deploy their solutions in a Software as a Service format, which guarantees unlimited scalability and global availability. Companies using hosted cloud solutions therefore have two problems. Firstly, they risk the displeasure of their customers at what could be perceived as false advertising – their products are not truly cloud based, and have none of the benefits of a true cloud based solution. Secondly, in providing none of the benefits that true cloud solutions do, they are far from being the best in industry.

Although true cloud solutions offer so many benefits, organisations must design their platform to take advantage of the built in seamless integration and elasticity, in order to realise these benefits. For this reason, Dubber built its recording platform with these true cloud features at its core, and is able to fully benefit from the AWS true cloud platform. Dubber therefore provides a call recording solution that functions as a Software as a Service and offers unlimited scalability, high security, an open API, rapid deployment and no upfront costs. As other true cloud solutions have done for their industries, Dubber has revolutionised the telephony industry and opened up a myriad of benefits for users: making call recording highly relevant and useful for everyone.