Livewire

I just finished reading a whitepaper regarding a digital media divide which was base around a struggle between content owners (e.g. HBO) and user generated content (UGC). The premise was the disruption created by UGC as being a threat to the content owners, essentially a competition for consumer timeshare and wallet. While I agree that there is a limit to the amount of content that can be consumed, I don’t see the divide of content owners vs UGC as the larger issue since I feel that consumers will always value good, original content. I believe the bigger issue is sharing and downward pressure on the price of mobile or web content. For example in the U.S., the price of a song is no more than Apple’s iTunes marketplace of $.99 due to their wide consumer base. Other services are moving closer to “all you can eat” with a subscription, such as Nokia’s Comes with Music, which is even less expensive. The price of digital content is further depressed via file sharing or sites that do not enforce copywrite. However, content owners can fight back and enable communities to form around their content which incorporates UGC to increase viewer loyalty and the value of their content. Potentially, concert and merchandise interest is increased for a musical artist or advertising premiums and ratings are increased for the broadcast or web/mobile viewing of a show such as Lost or Sopranos. In these instances, UGC can be harnessed to become an enabler, not a threat. It is a matter of changing business models to find all available revenue streams when the primary revenue stream is under pricing pressure.

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There have been many announcements over the last year with Communications Service Providers providing access to popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and others. In the short run, this provides potential subscription revenue and data plan uplift to drive average revenue per user. However, I still have many concerns with this approach in that it does not create differentiation or enable one of the Service Provider’s key assets, customer information, since the social networking sites are essentially closed “black box” solutions. Orange has just announced a service to consolidate social networking sites to enable the display of “popular functions of each site side by side so they can be accessed with one click… to send messages, upload photos and check status updates without having to browse individual URLs or log into separate sites” which I feel is a terrific step forward. This not only creates differentiation, but also a new customer experience to ease the issues with managing multiple social networking sites and puts the Orange brand in the front of that access portal. Essentially, this is having the original network provider manage these new networks in an efficient manner.

While the efforts mentioned above are interesting, I feel they still fall short due to the fact that the value of the social network, the information on member interactions or social graph, is still hidden from the Service Provider. The information is not combined with the vast amount of customer information already resident within the Service Provider’s own databases. Gaining access to that social graph would provide insights to key influencers and support rich campaign targeting, particularly when combined with data from the mobile web or IPTV platforms. This is one of the reasons Infosys has created a white-label offering for Service Providers to launch their own social networking platforms that would be integrated into their own customer information systems and assets, in addition to providing lifestyle themes such as sports, to provide purpose to those community interactions. It is my opinion that this model will create the most value to the service provider due to the rich customer information generated, the creation of new commerce and advertising opportunities, and the establishment of a hub to promote other value added services. What are your thoughts on this approach? I welcome the discussion.

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Jeremy Kloubec at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)