With mobile operators adopting triple and quad play strategies, either through partnership or direct ownership, do they need to adopt their billing strategies to allow the mobile to become the prime engine of content billing?
Richard Owen, vp of sales and business development at mobile payment services provider Upaid, thinks there is still plenty of mileage in premium SMS for the lower ticket items, the digital downloads that we are now all familiar with.
“PSMS continues to be strong, and there is not a lot of evidence it is diminishing,” he says.
“It’s a good fit for the content that’s there. But for more feature rich content, and when services such as TV on mobile become mainstream, that demands different payment methods.”
One of the drivers for a different payment method is purely the risk involved in putting large ticket items on a mobile bill.
“Operators are all OK with it (PSMS) up to the €5 level, and then beyond that they get a bit nervous from a risk point of view” Owen says.
Tanla Mobile’s Global Business Development Director Gautam Sabharwal, whose company has provided premium SMS platforms in the UK and India, also says that he doesn’t see PSMS volumes dropping off in the near future.
“Even though it’s not very elegant, some applications are unique to it, he points out”
Gautam says that the mobile content market has now created space for providers who are “not just a pipe into the networks but provide a value added service”.
He says that it is important to have a platform to allow content developers to set up services without needing deep technical knowledge of all the steps required for integration with a mobile operator.
“Quizzes, voting applications, WAP sites to manage content, these are the areas we can make it simpler to keep services integrated with the billing interface.
For Owen, the big change for mobile operators is that they are getting into a world where they compete head-on with other retailers and channels.
“If the mobile plan is that it is going to dominate your life and outstrip PC and internet consumption, then from the operators’ perspective they have to put themselves into that part of food chain.
“If you are a prepay customer, then feature rich content is going to gobble through your pre-pay allowance very quickly. You’ll see significant chunks taken out of it when you download content. So people will tend to use other methods, and perhaps even modes of delivery.”
Which of course would cut the operator out of the game. One example Owen gives is that of a MMC with a list of DVDs pre-loaded onto it. If you see a film you like then you are sent a code to unlock that film.
“In the MMC model — operators could be completely obviated by that process,” Owen warns..
Of course, for Owen, a payment services provider such as Upaid solves that problem, by tying the operator into the process, with “no change of requirement on the operator billing side”.
“From an operator perspective it means their business is running slightly differently in terms of bill presentment and payment. Even on OTA recharge it provides them with real time decisions on when customers can be topped up.”
Real time decision making on content services, how to bill for it and which deals to offer, is exactly what Qpass, now the digital content division of billing giant Amdocs, is all about.
Amdoc’s Qpass 6.0 is a horizontal software system which packages in meaningful ways to subscribers, across a variety of channels.
Roger Parks, vp product at Qpass, says operators are taking the first steps in terms of user experience to drive sales, but are still not acting like retailers – in terms of concepts such as segmentation and promotion.
“Operators have a huge catalogue, so how can they optimise for the discovery of content? It’s about presentation coupled to a delivery mechanism.”
“Qpass 6 enables them to build complex rules in real time, plus an interface to the marketing user layer, so product managers can build propositions themselves. They can put together different rules to enable that promotion, passing the billing system a pre-rated event.”
For Parks, integrating partner management, payment, CRM processes as well as content management and delivery, operators can manage sales on, near and off portal in a holistic way, no matter the channel or device in use.
In the end, content billing seems to be not so much about the billing, as the management of the processes to present the even to the billing system. And that is where the real value lies.