App Buyers Prefer Carrier or Credit Card Billing

There's an interesting bit of data in a recent Nielsen survey of users about smartphone and feature phone applications and behavior.

Specifically, users have clear preferences when it comes to how they want to pay for mobile apps, opening a wedge for service providers who want to increase the amount of commerce and payment services they can support and derive revenue from.

Given that users’ primary concerns are convenience and security, Nielsen found that users would prefer to have charges appear on their mobile service provider or credit card bills.

The immediate issue is that the most-popular app stores are not controlled or sponsored by mobile operators, but by the handset suppliers. Many think that is a good thing.

But the survey data also suggests a potential new role for mobile service providers as suppliers of third-party billing services. About 32 percent of both smartphone and feature phone users say they prefer to have payments billed on their mobile service statements.

About 31 percent say they currently pay by credit card, but only 24 percent they prefer to pay that way. About 20 percent say they use PayPal, and that's the same percentage of users who say they prefer to pay that way.

About 13 percent pay using iTunes, but just 11 percent say they prefer to pay that way.

Games Lead Mobile Apps

Games, weather, maps, navigation and search top the list of applications feature phone and smartphone users engage with most often, according to Nielsen.

Do Mobile Users Value Ability to Listen to Radio?

A new survey commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters, and conducted by Harris Interactive, found that 76 percent of respondents would consider paying a one-time fee of 30 cents to gain access to their local radio stations through their mobile phone.

The results obviously are touted as evidence for embedding broadcast radio capability in every mobile phone. One might argue the reverse is true. A "one time fee of 30 cents" is tanamount to no demand, one might argue.

For many--perhaps most--people, that is far less than the amount of money repeatedly donated to strangers on the street, at stop lights, to animal adoption services when buying pet food or at grocery stores for various charity campaigns sponsored throughout the year.

Those amounts are given in return for nothing at all tangible. So to say respondents to a poll "might" consider paying 30 cents, one time, to listen to radio on their mobiles arguably means less than nothing. It means people really do not value the feature all that much.

About 66 percent of adult respondents indicated that they would listen to local radio stations on their cell phones if that feature was available. Among all adults, young adults are even more likely to use this feature. Seventy-one percent of adults age 18 to 34 say they would use a built-in radio to listen to local radio stations on their cell phone.

One wonders if the base of users who already have had such features for years actually behave that way. Do you know anybody who listens to the radio on their mobile phone?

To be sure, Nokia estimates that 77 percent its customers who use the radio feature tend to use it about once a week. What isn't so clear is what percentage of FM-radio-equipped mobiles Nokia has in service actually use the radio feature at all.

In Asia and Latin America, people prefer FM radio over texting, cameras and even the Web, so logically, so should Americans, one might argue. Those markets aren't the same as the U.S. market.

Do people in the United States really want to access FM radio using their mobiles? It's just anecdotal, but I've been able to do so, on multiple devices, for years. I've never done so, perhaps in part because I rarely listen to the radio, even in the car. I have no idea whether that is typical behavior.

Sirius XM? That's a different story. Sirius XM gets used.

The point is that, from one standpoint, consumer willingness to consider paying 30 cents, one time, to use a feature is not quite an endorsement of the value of the feature. That's less than the cost of one song purchase. And way less than much-larger amounts people just give away, every day, for virtually no tangible reward.

Opanga Offers Store-and-Forward Video Delivery

Opanga's "NetRover Mobile" offers a way for mobile service providers to optimize the delivery of video content in non-real time (essentially store and forward) to alleviate the strain streaming places on mobile network bandwidth.

The solution allows operators to cache content on a device, in order to avoid service degradation during busy times on the network, and to avoid adding to network congestion.

If you think about a consumer digital video recorder as a device that captures real-time video for non-real-time viewing, Opanga is a way of capturing non-real-time video for real-time viewing.

It would also seem to be using a "bandwidth management" technique that does not obviously run afoul of potential network neutrality regulations that would prohibit any bit prioritization. Using the Opanga approach, there is no "prioritization," simply delivery at times when the network is lightly used.

Opanga likely will encounter the typical issues that have limited the use of "store and forward" approaches historically. By definition, it doesn't help with real-time or on-demand video. The concept requires some amount of local storage, probably limiting the use of most phones, and even most smartphones.

That said, Netflix historically has proven that non-real-time video delivery can be successful.

AT&T LTE Coming Mid-2011

AT&T today said it will launch its fourth-generation Long Term Evolution network by the middle of next year, and it will cover 70 to 75 million people by the end of 2011.

AT&T Apparently Realized It Needs to Get Moving on LTE

Time Warner Cable Won't Carry Epix: Netflix Streaming is the Reason, Apparently

Time Warner Cable subscribers won’t be able to watch premium cable services from Epix on its service anytime soon, as the cable provider has decided not to carry the network or its broadband and video on demand services.

And at the heart of that decision is a recent deal by Epix to make its film catalog available through Netflix’s broadband streaming service, according to multiple reports.

It's probably asking too much for companies to help their competitors, isn't it?

Time Warner Cable Really Hates Online Video

Did iPad Cannibalize Half of Best Buy's PC Sales?

Apple's iPad might have cannibalized as much as 50 percent of Best Buy's PC sales over the last quarter, the Wall Street Journal reports. If that keeps up, notebook and netbook sales could plummet.

'It's a very different environment now,' said Stephen Baker, the chief electronics analyst for market researcher NPD Group Inc. "The real cool stuff now will be the tablets, e-readers and probably the higher-end digital cameras."

Sirius XM Promises Satellite Radio 2.0

The fourth quarter of 2011 might be the time Sirius XM introduces the ability to customize audio feeds delivered over the Sirius XM service, but possibly also content captured from HD Radio, WiFi, and possibly terrestrial radio broadcasts as well.

"Satellite Radio 2.0" is expected to offer "significantly more choices for the consumer and contain functionality that does not exist today in our radios," says Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin.

Users might be able to customize their own channels using a “like” or “dislike” style button.

Sirius XM might analyze each song that was streaming through the Sirius XM spectrum, and then capture specific songs that met the listener’s preferences. The software could then cache that live content onto a new storage chip on the radio for playback at later times.

This caching could happen at any time that the radio was active, and not just while the user was listening to their personally designed channel.

All the while, the program could insert new content into the playlist that may potentially match the listener’s preferences and allows for music discovery over every single one of Sirius XM’s channels.
The same features might also be used for overall content discovery including news, sports, talk, and comedy programming as well.

Users might be able to save their favorite songs for instant playback at any time.

detail on Satellite Radio 2.0

webcast

ABC And Nielsen Partner On iPad App That ‘Syncs’ TV And Mobile Viewing

The ABC Television Group and The Nielsen Company have developed an iPad app for one of the network’s new primetime dramas in hopes of seeing how much of a connection there is between iPad viewing and regular TV watching.

The app is built on Nielsen’s Media-Sync Platform, which allows mobile apps to automatically detect and synchronize with TV programming using audio watermarks. That means users can watch, leave and come back again right where they left off.

The free My Generation Sync iPad app was available in iTunes’ App Store. In addition to promoting the show, "My Generation," the app also is also designed to help draw interest to Apple’s new $0.99 “TV show rental” offer with Apple.

ABC And Nielsen Partner On iPad App That ‘Syncs’ TV And Mobile Viewing

More Evidence Android Will Blow Past RIM And Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Platform

Android is eating the lunch of every major smartphone platform, according to new data from comScore.
While everyone else lost at least 1 percentage point of market share, Android gained 5 percentage points of share in the second quarter of this year.

More Evidence Android Will Blow Past RIM And Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Platform

New Twitter is "Media"

As one would reasonably have concluded that Google is now "media," not a search engine, one would reasonably conclude that Twitter also is becoming "media," not a text communication app.

With the new format Twitter is rolling out, which will include ability to integrate video and other related information, Twitter will tend to highlight the actual value and quality of information and analysis, which is going to lead to a scenario somewhat analogous to the music industry, where people buy songs, not CDs or albums.

Twitter is going to bring more of that sort of environment to news and video content. One has to wonder if that will lessen the value of packaged "news channels."

New Twitter Completes Its Transformation into News Source

HTC "Desire" for AT&T

Some Android enthusiasts might not like application overlays such as HTC's "Sense" interface. Some users might disagree. The new HTC Desire to be sold by AT&T and other carriers internationally is the latest in the HTC line up using a similar form factor and the Sense user interface.

Will Access Rules Kill New Fiber to Home Investment?

A number of vendors at the FTTH Council meeting said their business in Europe, where the European Union imposed open access rules, has come to a virtual standstill, and that's something they want to avoid in the U.S. market, Carol Wilson, Light Reading events chief editor, reports.

Much will hinge on whether Title II regulation is imposed on broadband access services, or whether, by some other mechanism, mandatory wholesale rules, especially with discounted access rates, are on imposed on the owners of fiber-to-customer networks.

To be sure, competitive providers would get a new lease on life if such rules were put into place. But just as surely, incentives to build new fiber-to-customer access plant will diminish.

Some will argue this won't happen. But it apparently is happening in Europe, at least by some accounts.

FCC Could Crash FTTH Party

Will Third Quarter Confirm Notion that Multichannel Video Business has Peaked?

The second quarter decline in multichannel video subscribers--the first ever in industry history--might not have been a statistial abnormality.

Rob Marcus, Time Warner Cable CFO says Time Warner Cable is on track to lose customers in the third quarter, with the weakness attributed to the economy. If that winds up happening at some other leading cable, satellite or telco companies, we could have a trend developing that could suggest the multichannel video industry finally has hit the wall, and has stopped being a growth industry.

According to researchers at SNL Kagan, the multichannel video entertainment market, which basically has grown in virtually unbroken fashion for decades, suffered its first-ever decline in the second quarter of 2010.

There was some continued shift of market share from cable and towards satellite and telco providers. But those shifts also were accompanied by an apparent net loss of 216,000 subscribers in the multichannel marketplace as a whole, compared to a gain of 378,000 in the second quarter of 2009.

Observers who have been watching what has been happening in some other legacy businesses, especially fixed-line voice services, are familiar with similar processes: gains for competitors and losses for the top incumbents. But there is more at work that market share gains and losses. Over the last decade, the total number of customers available for anybody to get has been dropping.

"Cable TV" has been a mature market for some time, but still has managed to eke out small gains, year after year, despite gains by satellite and telco competitors. But that appears to have hit a possible inflection point in the second quarter. More data, over more time, will be needed to confirm the possible trend, but it would be a historic watershed if the market actually shrank for the first time.

Cable was down a combined 711,000 subscribers, with six of eight top cable companies recording their worst losses ever. By contrast, satellite providers added a combined 81,000 subs and telcos netted 414,000.

Cable's combined share of the market was down to 61 percent from 63.6 percent in the second quarter of 2009.

Telcos now claim six percent of the video market, up from 4.3 percent year over year. It is tough at this point to figure out how much the economy and moribund housing market had to do with the results. Both those trends would normally be expected to slow the market.

But most observers also are watching for signs that alternative channels, ranging from online video to DVD rentals, are having an effect as well. So far, there has been scant evidence of any significant shift of viewing habits.

Some people, for all sorts of reasons, seem willing to live without paying for cable, satellite or telco-provided multichannel video entertainment. But most people appear not to see the advantage of cord cutting.

To be sure, there is an argument that the second quarter was a statistical anomoly. There has been no break in the growth trend line for multichannel video subscriptions, argues Michael Turk, a political and communications consultant. He chalks up the second quarter decline of 711,000 total industry subscribers as an artifact of "artificially" higher sign-ups as the broadcast digital TV transition occurred, a process that lead to higher-than-typical signups, followed by slower demand in the aftermath, but well within the historical growth profile.

The digital TV transition a year ago caused cable operators to offer temporary subscription discounts as a way of luring formerly-resistant consumers. It is possible that the expiration of deeply-discounted offers has lead some customers to churn off.

More likely, the temporary offers had similar effects as auto and housing credits recently have had: demand was simply pushed forward, leading to a decline of growth rates in subsequent quarters as the promotions expired.

If one subtracts out those who dropped cable when their discount expired, cable actually netted about 100,000 new subscribers in the second quarter of 2010.

But Time Warner Cable's guidance about the third quarter suggests there might be something to the notion that the video business has topped out.

Marcus said that Primary Service Units (or PSUs, a measure of voice, video and data customers) will likely fall below second quarter levels, for example.

"Video in particularly has been challenged," Marcus said. "Video net losses are pacing ahead of where they were in last year's Q3, voice growth is slower than it was last year and HSD [high-speed data] while the strongest performer, is still lower than last year. The net-net of all of that is that we may actually see a PSU loss for Q3."

link

Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Could Lose Franchises if Franchise Fees Drop 22.5% or More

New York City would have the right to terminate its franchise agreements with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems if franchise fees paid to the city decline 22.5 percent or more from the level recorded in the peak year of service.

The latest provision applies for the period 2010 to 2020. Verizon's franchise expires in 2020 as well.

TWC, Cablevision Franchise Deals With NYC Include 'Cord-Cutter' Provision