@CTIA: Off Deck Vs On Deck — Gatekeepers Who Don’t Care About The Travellers

The panel at CTIA at CTIA On & Off Deck, Virtuous Cycle or Zero Sum Game was marked by a severe and obvious lack of carrier participation. Not only were there none on the panel, but there was only one in the audience (who didn’t say much). I think it says a lot about the carriers attitude to this topic…
“The carriers that we work with are all to aware of their gatekeeper position,” said Jud Bowman, CTO Motricity, adding that they take about 35% of mobile content revenue. “Paypal came into the market and wanted to offer cheaper transactions and one of the major carriers (that’s Cingular) promptly turned Paypal off, and went futher and said if you’re using credit cards we’re going to turn off your shortcode.” For this reason it’s a myth that off deck bypasses the carriers, because you still have to use their billing system.
Larry Shapiro, EVP NA Mobile, WDIG, mostly defended the carriers, saying there was a lot of problems with off deck that were still getting sorted out, but he did acknowledge their overzealous gatekeeping. “We’re not only not at not having every payment on the bill, but when you offer another way to download content you get chopped down at the knees.”
John Puterbaugh, CEO Nellymoser, took that a bit further. “Not only are carriers clamping down on non-carrier included billing, the same is also true for rich media such as video, he said . It’s technically possible, but “as soon as it gets any critical scale it’s shut down, so you won’t find rich media content off the carrier deck.” He said they had some valid concerns and reasons for this, but didn’t elaborate…
In terms of the benefits of promoting off deck, Jayanthi Rangarajan, President and CEO Novarra, said that the average ARPU bump from off deck for 3 Italia is around $7-18 per month.
I made it sound like a bit of a carrier bash, but it wasn’t really, the panelists acknowledged there are problems with off deck. Steve Shivers, SVP and GM of OpenMarket, Qpass, said he thinks carriers realize they need to promote off deck… “It feels to the content industry they’re moving slowly but they have a lot of issues with off deck”, for example, refund rates are five times higher for off deck than on deck…In Europe no one thinks about calling a carrier to get customer service whereas In the US carriers want you to call them…Off deck has a number of bad apples and so on.
After it was over I asked Larry about the difficulties of promoting on deck content if it’s buried several pages down, and he basically said Disney wouldn’t do that and didn’t give any suggestions as to how it could. He said that if you want to be on the top of the deck you need the brands, the marketing and the quality of content to be put there and stay there, and that two guys working in a garage just aren’t going to create something that goes to the top of the deck. He’s got a good point and I can see why that is from the carriers’ point of view, but it doesn’t really work unless you’re Disney or one of its peers. If anyone has any ideas on how to promote content that’s near the bottom of a carriers deck I’d like to hear it. I have some, but they require the help of the carriers…
Moderator Linda Barrabee from the Yankee Group had some interesting stats to share:
The carrier share of online content purchases:
46% cingular
11% Spring
26% T-Mobile
17% Verizon
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