
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Directionally Helpful Trend

Labels:
apps

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
How BT Got Its Voice Revenues Down

Labels:
business model,
consumer VoIP

Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Email, Web, IM Top Enterprise Mobility Drivers

Labels:
business VoIP,
marketing,
mobile

Sunday, December 24, 2006
Build Strategy Makes a Big Difference

Another way of putting matters is that 80 percent of the local ports have no customers on them, and no revenue. That's not a prospect likely to make capital providers very comfortable. The fact is that some parts of every community, and some neighborhoods within every community, are more profitable than others, as indicated by Solon Management Consulting. Building in the most-profitable neighborhoods first, to get the revenue flowing, before tackling the more problematic areas is simply a business reality.
Labels:
broadband,
business model,
marketing

Saturday, December 23, 2006
Arbitrage Won't Drive VoIP Forever

That probably doesn't mean price arbitrage forfeits its key role in user adoption any time soon, simply because there are other cost elements to arbitrage. The U.S. cable operators, in fact, have extended price arbitrage into the local calling realm, offering VoIP-powered services that simply mimic the PSTN, but arbitrage the recurring access revenue stream, not the minutes. Inevitably, though, at some point, VoIP simply won't be about price arbitrage any longer, because there won't be much left to arbitrage. Users will have found they are paying for services and features way beyond the ability to place or receive a call, and service and app providers will have adjusted accordingly. A "soft landing," you might say.
Labels:
consumer VoIP

Piracy Part of the Business Model?

There also is some precedent in the video world for a small amount of piracy to be a good thing for the overall value chain and growth of a new business. In its earlier days, the U.S. cable TV industry used filters of several types to control viewing of premium services such as Home Box Office. So piracy was a matter of securing the proper filter and inserting it between the house drop cable and the distribution cable's "tap." In this scenario, manual audits were the only way to determine whether an installed filter was legal or not. And since assigning technicians to patrol the entire plant looking at "traps" costs money, there is a cost-benefit issue.
A service provider wants to minimize theft of service, but not completely, as the cost to control then outweighs the "losses" from theft. Also, there is a subtle way that some amount of piracy actually creates more revenue, at least for the service provider. The example is subscribers who pay for basic cable access but then are able to pirate HBO. In that scenario, a cable operator might actually get a recurring revenue stream it otherwise wouldn't have gotten, while the economic loss is borne by HBO, which isn't paid. With changed technology, this particular attack is seen rarely, if ever. Also, access to HBO no longer drives cable, satellite or telco TV penetration.
The point is that some amount of piracy must be tolerated because complete eradication costs too much. And there might even be some cases in which a limited amount of piracy actually can lead to a bigger revenue stream for legal uses. Earlier in its development, productivity software suppliers realized that some amount of piracy actually would increase the base for legal sales, because users grew accustomed to the use of particular products and then would buy legal copies.
As the network-delivered video business develops, particularly as an application or service used by large numbers of people who don't want to hassle with technical details, and just want to watch content on their HDTV and other screens, we likely will see a significant decrease in piracy and an equally significant increase in legal downloads. We might even find, as we have found before, that some amount of piracy can actually stimulate the legitimate part of the business.
Labels:
apps,
business model

Friday, December 22, 2006
Both Substitution and Augmentation

And one of the things about POTS is that there are latent values beyond the switch and transport technology that might be the real reasons customers buy POTS service. If you think in terms of "user communities," the PSTN outstrips nearly anything else we've built so far, with the exception of wireless. But if wireless is seen as untethered access to the PSTN, then the PSTN community is where one wants to be.
In other words, the PSTN directory is far more developed than any directory you or I have built ourselves. A "buddy" list can be built for the small number of people you communicate with regularly. Beyond that, the PSTN still rules. That's valuable. One might argue, at least at this point, that POTS is more reliable, in just about every sense, compared to just about any VoIP alternative. That has value for end users, and might continue to, even when the infrastructure changes.
Also, the business value of the PSTN, which is voice-oriented, arguably is enhanced when integrated with instant messaging, text messaging, conferencing, Web access and other features. All of that might help explain why just half (49 percent) of residential customers who adopt VoIP say they discontinued a traditional phone service when they got their VoIP services, according to a recent survey by In-Stat. Put another way, VoIP displaces half of existing POTS line purchases, but also augments POTS half the time.
Also, in addition to "cord cutters" who rely exclusively on wireless for their personal voice communications, In-Stat finds that nearly 12 percent of respondents say their only VoIP service is based on the use of soft clients. That's further evidence of the growing importance of IM-based voice, presumably including "call out to the PSTN" capabilities.
And blurring the distinction between "business" and "consumer" uses, half of the VoIP users say they use their residential VoIP service either in part or in whole for business purposes. The trend is especially pronounced among VoIPers who are softphone-only users. More than 40 percent of such people use VoIP for business applications.
There are lots of suggestive niches here. Even in the consumer space, it appears there are augmenters, displacers, "no phone" users, "no phone" business users, IMers and maybe people who don't like "gizmos" of various sorts (probably the same people who dislike cable decoders and other CPE).
Labels:
business VoIP,
consumer VoIP,
marketing

Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Sometimes You're Happy for the Wave the Other Guy Caught
Yeah, that's pretty much how you feel if you are a surfer paddling out and you see this. Great wave walling up; a longboard rider in per...
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
One recurring issue with forecasts of multi-access edge computing is that it is easier to make predictions about cost than revenue and infra...