One of the major issues for mobile downloads, such as videos or music is that users are charged by their mobile operator for their data. I
Take a 3 minute song - it will be just under 3 meg in size.
The operators have blurred the issue, but if your on a basic contract, there will be a monthly allowance of a few megabytes after which they start charging.
If you're on pay as you go you'll be even worse off. Networks charge up to £3 per megabyte of download even though the cost to them is pennies. And because you don't get itemised bills you will never know how much a download has cost you.
Essentially this is a complete scam by the mobile phone operators but it presents a major problem for content providers.
Take our 3 megabyte song - lets say you buy it on a £1.50 premium SMS charge. You will then pay another £9 in data charges if you're an unfortunately pay as you go user.
Is there a solution? Well there are two:
1. Use MMS for delivery. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly not all networks support MMS and all file formats in the same way - it doesn't always work. Secondly for it will cost the content provider up to 30p to deliver the MMS.
They could use a video shortcode (or MMS shortcode) - but currently the costs of this are very expensive and only likely to be used for the largest content providers.
2. Pre-pay for the data
The system works like this: you send a link to the file, or a wap link to the mobile user in the reply to the PSMS request.
That link is to a URL which does not incurr data charges to the networks - the data has been prepaid. The cost of this data is a few pence per megabyte and can be included in the cost of the download.
Right now, the second option is not widely available, however we have managed to incorporate this in our mobile content management system, immedia24.
My plan is to promote this 'fair data' policy so that mobile users understand that we're not ripping them off but that the mobile operators are doing that.
No comments:
Post a Comment