Skype Revamps Unlimited Calling Plans

Jim Courtney at Skype Journal says Skype has revamped all of its Skype Pro plans by creating flat rate unlimited (fair use of 10,000 minutes a month) international calling plans covering landline numbers in 35 countries, plus mobile numbers in some countries.

Among the notable changes are the cheaper calling plans for users who call between the United States and Mexico, elimination of connection fees and greater plan simplicity.

The plans do not require a contract. Users can buy plans covering calling to Canada and the United States; Canada, the United States and Mexio; or 32 countries plus Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Users also can upgrade their plans on a temporary basis. All plans include voice mail.

For users in Canada and U.S. the three plans:cost $2.95, $5.95 and $9.95 a month. European user plans cost €2.95 per month for calls within a single country, unlimited calling within 20 European countries for €3.95 per month and unlimited calling to 35 countries for €8.95 a month.

Similar plans are available for users in Asia, Brazil and the rest of the world.

Web TV Passes Legacy TV in Australia

Nielsen Online reports that, for the first time, Australians are spending more time online than they were watching TV. Nielsen Online says users are watching an average of 13.7 hours a week watching Internet TV compared with 13.3 hours of legacy TV.

Roy Morgan claims that the difference is because it used a representative cross-sample of the Australian population, including heavy, medium, light and non-Internet users, while the Nielsen data was based on an online panel that didn't cover all Australians.

UGC: No Business Model?

eMarketer projects that the number of US User-Generated Content creators will rise to 108 million in 2012, from 77 million in 2007.

But, despite the projected growth in the numbers of content creators, the monetization of user-generated media has not materialized, eMarketer suggests.

Retail models have not caught on, either, and advertisers are reluctant to attach their brands to content that is, by its nature, unpredictable, eMarketer says.

Well, what did you expect? Is there a business model, beyond connections, for email or chat or talking? People create because they can, and they want to. Service providers will make some money providing the ability to do so. There might be a bit of advertising for email or chat apps.

But for the most part, user-generated content will not generally lead to a business model for its creators. UGC is not really a "medium." It is communications. Some UGC will be monetized, just as some independent films wind up getting commercial success. It happens. But i won't be common.

iPhone Keyboards, Bigger Screens?

As much as Apple's iPhone has surfaced latent demand for new mobile Web behaviors, the next rounds of development will have to tackle more prosaic issues: proliferating the product line to better address market segments: heavier texters who like keys and larger screens for users who really want to use the device as a notebook substitute.

There is every likelihood, in other words, that the iconic iPhone form factor will diversify, the way iPods have, with models optimized for particular use cases.

Industry sources told Times Online that the device will have a "radically different" appearance to the current device, which has a 4.5 inch screen and slick, aluminium backing. Among the possibilities are flip version, which would enable the screen to be larger, and a sliding model with a regular qwerty keyboard - as opposed to a touchscreen one.

The Financial Times even thinks Apple will within a year or so change distribution deals, abandoning single-carrier franchises as early as June 2009 in the U.S. market and October 2009 in the U.K. market.

That of course likely will lead to a change in revenue streams, from revenue-sharing payments to transactions and Internet advertising. That would be a fairly abrupt shift of income stream, but a necessary step to build greater device handset volumes and ad potential.

More Aggressive Prepaid Mobile Efforts

Prepaid mobile calling offers have gotten more competitive over the past year as the overall market continues to saturate. T-Mobile launched FlexPay, providing prepaid customers the same plans as those currently available to contract subscribers.

Verizon Wireless enhanced its pay-as-you-go INpulse plans by creating lower voice and messaging rates. Boost Mobile, meanwhile, introduced Unlimited by Boost to counter prepaid offers from Leap Wireless and MetroPCS.

As carriers and mobile virtual network operators search for new subscribers, they increasingly are targeting the prepaid customer base. Not only are more carriers launching postpaid-like monthly prepaid plans that include buckets of minutes and value-added features, but they are also extending value-added services to standard prepaid services such as messaging buckets and even unlimited messaging.

Carriers have even started selling prepaid customers subsidized handsets, which is something that was unheard of in the industry just 18 months ago.

T-Mobile arguably is the most aggressive of the major carriers in competing with the regional prepaid players. Up to this point AT&T and Verizon Wireless have mostly avoided chasing that customer segment with any vigor.

Broken Internet by 2010?

"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,"
Jim Cicconi, AT&T VP, says, in a speech reported by the Financial Times.

"In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today," Cicconi maintains.

He argues that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" will increase 50-fold by 2015.

"Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute," he says, predicting that "video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today."

eBay Considering Skype Sale?

At the CTIA Wireless meeting recently, people were wondering where some of the Google voice guys were. The speculation was that Google was mulling a purchase of Skype.

So now eBay CEO John Donahoe says in the Financial Times that "if the synergies are strong, we'll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we'll reassess it." Any such decision and sale won't come until the end of this year, though.

Skype had revenues of $126 million for the quarter, up 61 percent year over year, and that it added 33 million new registered users, giving it a total of 309 million registered users around the world. eBay indicated it even hopes to make a profit - for the first time - on Skype this year.

The $4.2 billion eBay acquisition of Skype had been to meld Skype into eBay's core auction businesses. So far, that has proven to be a virtually insurmountable problem.