Tarun Mohan, CEO of PhoneyTunes, during his presentation at the session on Mobile Entertainment and VAS at Convergence India said that though the subscriber base is growing, the VAS provider is not seeing a corresponding growth in VAS. Even then, it’s not enough for there to be a VAS boom – the billing isn’t transparent enough. Telco’s also tend to restrict subscription services. There are cases where the content downloaded is not the same as that previewed. To overcome the issues related to WAP enablement, PhoneyTunes has attempted to go off-portal: they’ve come up with two solutions – a kiosk which allows content to be previewed before download, and an SD Card based initiative called Muzik Shop. For the latter, they have tied up with memory card manufacturers, with DRM encrypted media content that can be previewed, but needs to be purchased for the full content. PhoneyTunes has also launched a website with movies and videos, which require an activation key for access, with payment via SMS. Access to the site can be purchased for a day, week or month, and they’ve included paypal blling, credit card, prepaid card payments and more.
Rajesh Sawhney, President of Reliance Entertainment feels that voice is the only killer application in the Indian mobile ecosystem, and no VAS application has matched up to the scale of ringtone based applications. He put forth a few alternatives that could be applications that work, including – location based services, user generated content, mobile payment etc. The demand for short content is growing, and he gave the popularity of the Wii as an example of “a quickie being demanded”. He said that Reliance has been talking to the ICC for launching a 5-5 (as opposed to 20-20) form of cricket.
Rajat Mukarji, Vice President-Corporate Affairs, Idea Cellular spoke about issues with content delivery to users with different types of handsets, wherein the network and the application has to be able to determine what the device requires. He doesn’t see much difference between 3G and GPRS, apart from the fact that with the latter, there are latency issues. He also mentioned viral messaging as something which eventually benefits the operator. In terms of video content, he said that while people might not want to watch the entire TV shows, they might want content like the last over of a cricket match.
Manoj Pant, VP-Support for Roamware India said that VAS, for operators, is about bragging rights – who launched which service first. Once the launch of one is dispensed with, they move to the next one, without really trying to monetize the earlier opportunity. VAS faces challenges in terms of capex, opex and marketing costs, and of return on investment. In the future, there are going to be short launch cycles, high risk of failure and a new service every week. He put forth a case for sponsored content and mobile advertising.