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.

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

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