Revenue Leakages In Mobile VAS Billing Are A Software Issue Says Rajat Mukarji Of Idea Cellular

Time and again we’ve heard from content providers that there are revenue leakages in the billing system, and no transparency with respect to revenue share. While leakages have been quoted as being anything from 20 percent to 50 percent, revenue share too has been lop sided in favour of the operator, who has the cake and eats it too. This was the basis of the conversation at Mobile Monday Mumbai in January:
Content providers had talked about going off-portal and establishing another revenue stream via a physical distribution; about forming a representative body, and even boycotting operators for a bit – but that revenue stream from the operators remains critical to them, and the cost of going off-portal too high.
At Convergence India, I asked Rajat Mukarji, Vice President-Corporate Affairs for Idea Cellular to explain the issues that operators have with giving audits of downloads to content providers, to prevent revenue leakages. Initially, he passed the question to the content provider on the panel: Tarun Mohan, CEO of Phoneytunes said that with a centralized billing system that Phoneytunes has established with Bharti Airtel, revenue leakages have come down from 45 percent to 2 percent.
Taking a cue from this response, Mukarji decided to blame the software: Networks, he said, are built for voice, and billing systems record events. As soon as you move to non-voice events, it’s a challenge for the billing system to capture it. It’s a glitch in the process that needs to be corrected.
Make of that what you will, but I think it’s high time some transparency was enforced by the government – not just for billing, but also a price breakup to make the revenue share transparent. With Mobile content under the service tax net, one might see the government demanding audited results – all you software manufacturers would probably do well to submit proposals of billing software to operators, if that is truly the issue.
Meanwhile, maybe all you content providers can tell us if it is well and truly a software issue. The comment box is yours…

Related:
Mobile Gaming Under Price Pressure
Operators Receive Flak From Content Providers For High Handed Approach
— <a href="http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/third-party-billing-will-soon-come-into-mobile-content-business/&quot; title="

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