SMS.ac is here at CTIA (and MES, they call it “coming out of stealth mode”) touting the news that the company is moving into mobile content distribution. The pitch is that SMS.ac has a registered user base of 50 million registered users on more than 400 carriers in 180 countries and is able to bill 1.5 billion mobile phone users around the world (that is, if those users join SMS.ac), and can get the content up and making money in 24 hours. The company is well aware of the controversy surrounding it and has got a couple of men in to increase credibility, including George Kidd, director of UK regulatory body ICSTIS.
Companies interested in selling content via SMS.ac communities will have to adhere to the Global Consumer Bill of Rights…SMS.ac is also providing carriers with a system to shut out content providers if complaints against it rise above a level preset by the carrier. The applications will also have to be in xPML, a proprietary mark-up language, which ties it into the mobile, user and billing APIs.
The billing is done through the carrier as per normal (except that the content owners won’t have to get the relationship), and I was assured by executive vice president Greg Wilfahrt that “in almost all instances the content providers take the lions share” of the revenue.
In order to encourage content owners to sign up for the service SMS.ac is putting up $25 million in marketing, services and other incentives.
Greg expects subscriptions to play a big part of the service, for things like mobile video, music, blogs and applications. I’ve seen the buying process — it tells you what you’re getting, the cost of the service and the cost of additional messages in the service, and the prices are in a different color to stand out.
The SMS.ac guys are making all the right sounds about accountability, transparency and the importance of consumer confidence, and assuming the whole system is done well I think it would be a good way to distribute mobile content. Community sites are viral, so people recommend content to their friends, the clubs on SMS.ac recommend content to each other, and the content is easy for the other person to get — it’s drag and drop using AJAX. Finding mobile content, especially good mobile content, is one of the most difficult aspects of consuming it. There’s very little information about which games are good, which videos are funny, which music is cool and so on. When people do get content recommended by friends it’s often touch-and-go whether it will run on their handset. If friends can recommend content and there’s an easy way to obtain it things will go a lot smoother. Likewise there’s a lot of scope for clubs, where people with similar interests can recommend content to each other.
Of course, this will rely on critical mass. There needs to be a critical mass of content or there won’t be enough for people to recommend for specific interests. Likewise, there has to be a critical mass of people doing the recommending for it to be worthwhile to the content providers. Not all of the 50 million people registered with SMS.ac are active users of the service, and it’s unclear what proportion are active and what proportion registered and never returned.
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