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Billing for content – coming soon!
Alex Leslie - Jun 29, 02:05 PM
Over the last couple of years the pendulum of opinion has swung back and forth. At one end the operators agreed, hopefully, that billing would be an easy to support, flat rate affair. The vendors, meanwhile, agreed (gleefully) that every transaction would be accounted for, every piece of content charged for, meaning software needed by all.
For a while I thought the operators were right. I thought that billing would basically be about bundles of services that cost a flat fee per month, billing would become boring and disappear. Partly I based this theory on the fact that operators in North America had done some research that proved that only a tiny percentage of customers exceed the overall price of a bundle, so there was no need to introduce rules to prevent over-usage.
The trouble is that that research was done a few years ago in a world where downloading movies or catching up with television programmes via the internet was simply not feasible.
This over-usage is one reason that operators will now have to account for every transaction, survive the anger of some customers (those very over-users) and get on with their lives.
The other reason that content will be charged for is that Mr Murdoch says so.
Rupert Murdoch may not be your favourite person (and to be honest he probably doesn’t care one way or the other) but he is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary grasp of how business works and an instinct that allows him to judge a customer pretty accurately.
Rupert Murdoch is annoyed. He is losing a revenue opportunity. Worse than that, he is leaking money. He has discovered that it is possible to get the Wall Street Journal and various other newspapers of his for free – online. We have known this for a while and simply haven’t told him. So he has decided to charge for online news.
And so it will be the world of digital media, not telecoms, the internet – the archetypal communistic, drug induced, den of pleasure and free information – that will turn the tide and ultimately decide that content must be charged for.
Information has value. Fascination also has value. Virtual worlds have value, social networking sites have value. Some of these we now know the value of, others we have yet to crack. The Chinese have begun to make money out of social networking, charging tiny amounts for tiny, fun transactions; others will follow.
The good news is that the industry that is best placed to be able to account for millions of tiny transactions is the communications billing industry. We have been doing it for years.
So dust off the slides and saddle up the horse, the billing for content gold rush is on! It is just happening in a different landscape to the one we thought it was happening in.
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