Netflix Gains Viewership in 2011, Hulu Loses, Amazon Up

Netflix continues to lead all streaming services in viewership, and would appear to have a huge lead where it comes to "subscription streaming" revenue. Many of the sites create revenue by showing ads, or even more indirectly by "gluing" a subscriber to some other service, such as a video subscription service.

AT&T Cash Will Not Help T-Mobile USA

The $3 billion cash payment AT&T has to pay to Deutsche Telekom as part of a break-up fee for the collapse of the deal whereby AT&T was to buy T-Mobile USA will not help T-Mobile USA at all. All of that cash will be used by parent Deutsche Telekom to pay down debt. 

As part of the break-up fee, T-Mobile USA will receive a large package of  mobile spectrum in 128 “Cellular Market Areas,” including 12 of the top 20 markets (Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Baltimore and Seattle).
 
Likely of greater immediate importance is a seven-year roaming agreement that will allow T-Mobile USA to improve its footprint significantly. Population coverage will increase from 230 million potential customers at present to 280 million.

As a result of the agreement with AT&T, coverage will be extended to many regions of the United States in which T-Mobile USA previously had neither its own high-speed mobile communications network nor the associated roaming agreements. AT&T cash won't help T-Mobile USA

The cash component of the break-up fee directly reduces Deutsche Telekom’s net debt, thereby by strengthening the financial performance indicators affecting the company’s rating.

Amazon weighed buying RIM

Research In Motion Ltd apparently has turned down takeover overtures from Amazon.com and other potential buyers because the BlackBerry maker prefers to fix its problems on its own, according to a report by Reuters. 


Amazon reportedly hired an investment bank this summer to review a potential merger with RIM, but it did not make a formal offer. It is not clear whether informal discussions between Amazon and RIM ever led to specific price talk, or who else had approached RIM about a takeover. Amazon weighed buying RIM

That such ideas were considered shows how volatile the mobile space has gotten recently, as content providers, video entertainment companies, many consumer electronics manufacturers, advertising concerns, banks, transaction processors and retailers ponder the growing, and in many cases, strategic role mobility is playing across a broad range of industries. 


For Amazon, the draw likely was a way to get its services and content onto smart phones, as Amazon now is able to leverage tablet screens to support its e-commerce and e-content initiatives. 


Some might speculate that RIM's patents could have been interesting, as well. Patents have become increasingly important in the smart phone business, and any future move by Amazon in that direction might well be on surer footing if Amazon could acquire both a patent portfolio and an existing manufacturing capability, brand awareness and customer base. 

Cable Operator Competition Puts Pressure on Other CLECs

Some years ago, I recall having a conversation with an experienced veteran executive in the competitive local exchange carrier industry, who was convinced cable operators would not prove a threat in the CLEC business, a point of view I never have agreed with. 

To be fair, the executive at the time was running a CLEC that focused more on multiple-site businesses than single-site organizations. 

You can argue that both points of view are correct, that cable companies have indeed proven successful in the small business segment (perhaps 16 voice lines or fewer), but have yet to make an assault on the mid-market or enterprise segments of the market. Cable ops have succeeded in small business market

Integra Telecom, the Portland, Ore.-based CLEC that had in the past focused primarily on smaller accounts, might agree that cable companies are indeed a threat. In fact, Integra Telecom now hopes to focus most of its attention on larger customers. 

Integra Telecom revenues, which peaked at $683 million in 2008, fell to $616 million in 2010, in part because of continuing impact of the Great Recession and in part because some smaller businesses went out of business.

But company executives would also say that new competitive threats from rivals including Comcast Corp. were a key factor.

So Integra began targeting larger customers. Integra Telecom's challenges not unique 

That same decision-making context is certain to affect other CLECs, and sales partners for CLECs, as cable operators now only continue to show they are effective in the small business market, but as they slowly gear up to tackle larger accounts as well. 

Unless you believe the deal Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks have to resell Verizon services is somehow invalidated by regulatory authorities, those cable operators now have many of the tools they will need to succeed in sales of products to larger organizations, not limited to wireless services. 

NFC Hype About to Crash

At some point, overly-optimistic near-term expectations for near field communications payments will diminish, if Gartner is correct.


The reason is that NFC was in mid-2011 at the peak of a hype cycle, which typically means a crash of expectations.


So get ready for a change of public thinking about NFC, with a shift to other apps NFC can enable.


All of that is reasonable thinking, but also will be driven by what Gartner expects will be an inevitable (albeit temporary) collapse of expectations about what NFC can accomplish in the near term.


"When it comes to payments, NFC doesn’t yet offer sufficient convenience to persuade consumers to change their habits," says Thomas Husson, Gartner analyst. "Swiping a credit card instead of waving it is not fundamentally different: You still have to enter your PIN for security reasons."


"The real game-changer is to add value before and after the transaction, enabling consumers to discover offerings via contextualized coupons and to explore new product and service information, and enabling companies to engage with consumers by providing loyalty points and rewards after buying a product," he says.


We agree. NFC is just one of the many technologies that can be plugged into a broader digital wallet strategy.  NFC payment a part of broader wallet value

"Latency" Applies to Marketing, Not Just Communications

Marketing in the Internet age is affected at every level by dramatically lower “information latency.”

Engineers typically measure latency as a matter of time delay, such as the lag between the time a message is launched, and the time a message is received. But the concept also seems to describe the nature of marketing in an Internet age.

For information consumers, latency might be viewed as the total time elapsed for a plane trip, door to door, for example. No matter how many other passengers might be traveling on a particular route, on a particular day, there is some minimum elapsed time to get from point A to point B. That is consumer-experienced latency.

There is a different meaning for a consumer than for a producer, though. From the point of view of flight operations personnel, latency is an entirely different matter.

It is true that the amount of time spent in the air, getting from one airport to another, is affected by headwinds, flight control operations or congestion in the take off or landing patterns that are out of any producer’s control.

But many elements are within a producer’s control, to a certain extent, such as time to clean a plane once it has landed, time to refuel, passenger and cargo loading time, for example.

In a marketing context, consumer-experienced latency is the time it takes to learn enough about how to solve a particular problem to reach a firm buying decision. From a producer point of view, latency is the time it takes to provide information to such prospects at every stage of the consideration process.

Consider only the matter of getting “catalog” information to potential customers. In the past catalogs were printed and mailed at relatively high cost, with information aging every step of the way until the time a prospect actually used a catalog to check an item’s availability or price.

That had meant an information latency issue that was compounded by an accuracy issue, as prices and availability for large catalogs begin to drift out of conformity to reality for months before potential buyers were even able to view such catalogs.

In the age of the Internet, all that is outmoded. Catalogs ought to be, and often are, updated nearly in real time, with information latency a matter of hours to days when a producer decision has been made. Internet information sources now have collapsed latency, both in terms of time and cost.

From a consumer perspective, information latency likewise has compressed. Nobody has to ask for a catalog or wait for delivery. The information often is only “clicks away.”

A decade ago, we might have described the rise of “infomediaries,” agents that work on behalf of consumers to help them take control over information gathered about them for use by marketers and advertisers.

The concept of the infomediary was first suggested by McKinsey consultants and professors John Hagel III, and Marc Singer in their book  Networth.

The idea is not much heard of in 2011, but in some reasons that is because software increasingly acts as an infomediary. Real simple syndication feeds, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn feeds provide examples. what is an infomediary?

Price comparison apps and daily deals programs are other examples in the consumer space.

The marketing point is that software “agents” now widely assist prospects and buyers in gathering information directly related to products they buy. All of that means the fundamental change in marketing has been consistently in the direction of lower latency over time.

AT&T Emphasizes Spectrum Policy

In announcing the end of its effort to acquire T-Mobile USA, AT&T again emphasized the need for access to "additional spectrum" as a continuing issue, including AT&T's pending acquisition of spectrum from Qualcomm.

“Adding capacity to meet these needs will require policymakers to do two things," said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. "First, in the near term, they should allow the free markets to work so that additional spectrum is available to meet the immediate needs of the U.S. wireless industry, including expeditiously approving our acquisition of unused Qualcomm spectrum currently pending before the FCC."

"Second, policymakers should enact legislation to meet our nation’s longer-term spectrum needs," Stephenson said. AT&T abandons effort to buyT-Mobile USA