Skip to main content

Voice puts the pinch on Content

Content providers in Thailand are struggling to stay afloat after a restructuring of the revenue sharing between the mobile operators and themselves.

Firms like Advanced Info Service (AIS) have been offering content on their 2.5G networks here for sometime. This has spawned a number of content partners to spring up.

The previous arrangement were of the order of 65% to 80%.

The new arrangement sets a 50:50 split of the revenue between proivder and operator.

The operators say that this is due to the operating costs of their networks and that up to now this has been a trial offering.

It smells more like a knee jerk reaction to falling revenues from voice.

When will the market wake up and realize that paying for voice is dead. The secret to the success of operators going forward will be in the successful channeling of content, where voice is but another type of content.

This is a worrying trend. If the pinch continues then I see that most of the content partners will not survive long. This does not bode well for the consumer of mobile services.
Labels:

Comments

Paul Jardine said…
If the free market starts to work then the content providers will move to another delivery mechanism, rather than go out of business. There are several that I can think of that are becoming practical! ;)
5:28 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PC over IP - The Teradici Effect

Teradici are hoping to blur the lines between PC and Data Centre. Their solution allows a use to view multiple screens and control the blade PC over IP. This is kind of like the dumb terminals with a new edgy deployment. The intention is that all of the computing power is performed offsite in a centralized area, the Data Centre, and this will save on power and maintenance costs as the engineers are co-located with the hardware and therefore don't have to go out to the client site for basic maintenance. The Teradici Company Article found in the Wall Street Journal
Post a Comment
Read more

In the overlap of technology, marketing and social media the QR Code is critical

Outside of consulting on telecommunications, CIO advisory, and the business adoption of technology I also completed an MBA.  One of the projects was on the potential use cases of two dimensional barcodes. Today the QR Code , one of many types of 2D codes, is seen as being a critical component of any good marketing plan.  As a natural integration between social media and devices I would extend VMob Bob's question " What can a mobile operator learn from Facebook ?" and also ask how can they step and start to make innovations with the extensions to social media that already exist today?
Post a Comment
Read more

Access as infrastructure, what does this mean for Telco 2.0?

Having recently attended a seminar by Catherine Middleton from Ryerson on Australia's NBN initiative it got me thinking about "access as infrastructure". The Australian Government is investing $B's of public and private capital in a national broadband network that is a fibre to the premise platform, although for distant and remote sites it will most likely be a fixed wireless solution.  The proposition from Dr. Middleton is that ubiquitous access will create a platform for services that separates competition from access, sounds like Telco 2.0. The question I posed was if the idea is a common platform but close to 10% of that access will be at 12Mbps rather than 100Mbps (fixed wireless versus fibre) then surely the lowest common denominator will prevail and services will be designed for 12Mbps.  You would then question the rationale of FTTP or FTTH when you could go fixed wireless.  Over time LTE and similar technologies will see an increase in speed that will of...
Post a Comment
Read more