Subscription time - after cable TV, it's mobile content

Sitaram Sundalia - Televisionpoint.com
To streamline revenues and plan better content rollout, mobile content providers and operators are planning to offer high-end content like chat, games and comics on a subscription basis. Operators such as Hutch and Reliance Infocomm are understood to be working on rolling out subscription-based premium content in the next few weeks.

"Subscription-based services have become the need of the hour. While it provides customers the option to subscribe for any piece of content on a monthly basis for a certain amount, it helps the operators and content providers to plan their revenues and roll out their content better without hoping for the consumers to download," says Rajiv Hiranandani, Country Head, Mobile2Win (M2W).

"Secondly, subscription-based value-added services (VAS) also works, as it is easy and streamlined instead of downloading every month," he adds. M2W is going to start offering comics on a monthly subscription basis. It could be priced in the range of Rs 50 per month. Coruscant Tech, another content provider is already offering Uncle Pai's comic strips on the Tata Indicom network on a downloadable basis.

According to industry experts, subscription-based services could also be a step towards increasing average revenue per user, which has decreased from approximately Rs 600 to the present Rs 400 per user over the last two years. " With subscription-based services, the customer would have already paid up in the beginning of the month for VAS," says Hiranandani.

Currently, about 80 per cent down loads of VAS come from WAP portals of operators and 20 per cent from SMS downloads, industry experts say. The VAS market in India approximately stands at Rs 350 crore, according to SSKI's 2005 report on the mobile VAS market, and is expected to grow to Rs 3,800 crore by 2010.

A small beginning in offering content such as caller tunes, wallpapers, ringtones on a monthly subscription basis ranging from Rs 2530 has already been started by the operators.

While not divulging his company's latest plans, Mahesh Prasad, President, Applications and Solutions Group, Reliance Infocomm said, his company started the data service offerings when the Indian mobile industry was dominated by voice usage. "Initially we offered it free to educate people and since April 2005 we started charging them," he said.

"We have devised unique pricing mechanism keeping in mind customer convenience, affordability and flexibility of use. A large set of frequently used applications was classified under membership category with two options of monthly membership fee of Rs 25 for a day pass of Rs 3 (valid for 24 hours) to access these applications. Other applications, which were more impulsive in usage, are charged on `pay per use' basis. We have received tremendous response for R World with this unique pricing model and till date the usage has gone as high as 1.5 billion page views per month," Prasad adds.

However, Arun Gupta, COO of Mauj, a mobile content provider feels, "India is still six to eight months away before we roll out premium content on a subscription basis as currently operators are sorting out billing issues."