U.S. Cable Operators Will Lose 6 Million Households by 2015

U.S. cable operators will lose six million more customers by 2015, predicts Jonathan Doran, Ovum analyst, down from 60 million households in 2010 to 54 million households.

Doran estimates that U.S. households subscribing to cable dropped by four million between 2007 and 2010. The losses will come from a combination of share losses to satellite and telco competitors, plus some amount of replacement by online services.

Datamonitor | Media Center | New generation of TV services begin to close gap on cable

Dwolla Promises Retailers Lower Transaction Costs

Much of the original premise behind mobile payments was that it could lead to lower merchant transaction fees. That has not always proven to be the case, but Dwolla claims it does deliver on the promise.

Augmented Reality for Navigation

The downside for video-assisted navigation services used by auto drivers is that they might be tempted to look at the screen, instead of keeping their eyes on the road. This is useful, but potentially also a source of distracted driving danger.

Mobile Payments Boosts Ecosystem Value

Mobile and fixed service providers these days continually face the challenge of adapting their services in ways that preserve or create significant roles in the Internet, application, broadband access and voice ecosystems. In that regard, mobile payments and banking are significant precisely because those sorts of services are amenable to leverage.

In other words, service providers have other assets they can bring to bear that offer a substantial role in the creation of value, and presumably, therefore, a substantial role in revenues and profit within the ecosystem. It isn't that mobile banking and mobile payments cannot be offered "over the top," as virtually all other applications now can. It is rather that mobile service providers have existing assets to leverage, typically described as including active billing relationships with hundreds of millions of customers.

“Google’s massive, but Google does not have a billing relationship with 99 percent of its customers,” Deutsche Telekom Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Ed Kozel said in an interview last week. “That’s our opportunity.”

Also, some ways of conducting mobile banking and payments make use of text messaging, a service mobile operators largely control. In principle, mobile service providers also have billing systems set up to handle micro-payments, a potentially significant part of the overall mobile payments business.

Tablets also represent an opportunity. Online or virtual goods payments are growing in volume, and tablets should provide a richer environment for that sort of activity, especially as tablets develop as significant platforms for gaming and content consumption.

By some estimates, the retail mobile payments business could account for a third of the $1.13 trillion global market in mobile transactions by 2014, according to IE Market Research. Note the obverse, that other transactions will represent two thirds of mobile activity.

`Mega' Payments Race Pits Google, Visa Against Phone Operators - Bloomberg

Amazon Streaming Video Service Has an Advantage

In business, it typically is advantageous when one competitor can afford to merchandise (give away) something of value that other competitors charge for.

Amazon, for example, now offers an instant video streaming service for its U.S. "Amazon Prime" customers. Amazon Prime is its $79 a year service which includes free two-day shipping for Amazon customers. The deal is that Amazon Prime members get access to Amazon's streaming service for no additional cost.

To be sure, Amazon's service currently offers unlimited, commercial-free and instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows, where Netflix offers something on the order of 20,000 items. The Netflix streaming-only subscription costs $7.99 per month, which adds up to about $96 a year.

The point is that Amazon has another way to monetize its service, compared to Netflix.

AMAZON TAKES AIM AT NETFLIX: Instant Streaming Of 5,000 Movies And TV Shows Part Of Amazon Prime

VoIP Bandwidth Calculator

I recently ran into a cable TV executive who reported some issues with a recent business hosted IP telephony installation. The issue was the sizing of the upstream bandwidth. Apparently, the issue was that the hosted IP telephony system also was interacting with some premises gear that essentially required four call paths to set up a session.

Here's a table to estimate the bandwidth required to support a given number of lines (voice paths) across a broadband connection, using a variety of codecs, and assuming you do not have the aforementioned problem.

VoIP Bandwidth Calculator

Will Apple’s Subscription Plan Drive Developers to Android?

Google and Apple are in a building race for the loyalties of content providers and developers using their respective application stores.

While the iPhone has the largest app store, Google recently overtook Nokia and other phone manufacturers with the largest mobile operating system market share.

Google's "One Pass" will allow publishers to sell subscriptions with better terms than they can get with Apple. Google is only taking a 10 pecent share of the revenues, will Apple takes 30 percent.

Will Apple’s subscription plan spark a developer exodus? | VentureBeat