Do Apps spell the end of SMS?
Posted on March 15, 2011It should come as no surprise to anyone that when you fire a text off to a premium rate SMS service, the network providers make a good profit. You’d expect them to do this; they are having to process the payment, handle the SMS, route it and so on. However, what may surprise some is exactly how healthy this profit is. If you’ve paid £1 for a service, you can expect around 42p of that to go to the network operator. If you’re dealing in a business that receives thousands of questions a day, then that’s a lot of money. Although if you deal at the higher price points you can reduce the 42% take down to around 35%-ish and things start to look a little rosier. Indeed, many of our competitors have recently increased their prices. AQA 63336 have recently increased their pricing from £1 to £1.20 and then further on to £1.50. The SMS service provided by the ‘men with moustaches’, 118118 has recently been raised from £1 up to £1.20. Without this trying to sound like an advertising bite (it isn’t!) Quext is still only £1 per question and we hope to continue this way for the forseeable future (actually, we’re one of the only services to still offer messages No Charge if we can’t find an answer, but anyway..).
For some years now, those providing mobile SMS services have had to live with this – it’s an unavoidable bit of the business we’re in. However, a revolution has taken over the world of mobile recently and it’s called Apps. Mobile Applications have taken off on a scale that few could have predicted a few years back. It pains me to say it, but primarily, the success has been a result of the experience users have received on the iPhone. Yeah, applications have been available for some time on older phones (I used to have a on old-school HTC phone on Windows Mobile and I managed to download some rather appalling apps on that) but they never really got useful or intuitive until the iPhone and his older brother, iOS came along. Perhaps more importantly, the purchase mechanism was never really trusted until Apple introduced the App Store. One centralized location where you can purchase applications safe in the knowledge that your details are safe with the guys from California (well, almost).
Since then, applications are all the rage. Blackberry have an App World, while Android has Android Market. Companies are clambering over each other to build the next big app with big software houses such as EA now taking the handheld gaming market seriously. This is wise, considering that the iPhone game industry is worth $500 million dollars in the US alone (that’s about £311m in the Queen’s money). However, it’s not just games houses that are pumping out apps. Sky have an app that lets you record TV; the Highways Agency has a traffic app; even Starbucks has an app. That’s all super and smashing, but where can SMS service operators take advantage?
Well firstly, whatever you were delivering over the air, you can now deliver on app (obviously, provided it’s suitable). One fixed price and away they go. No need to text you for bus timetables (for instance), you can now get them over the air on your app. Result. With the increasing availability of Internet, Push messaging can even do away with the requirement for any SMS interaction at all.
For services like Quext though, there is one very important place where Apps come into play, and that is the returns from places like the App Store. At the moment, Apple retains approximately 30% of all transaction funding which is immediately around 12% better for service operators than delivering and charging by SMS. The funding mechanisms of the other App Shops is not as transparent which isn’t going to be helped by the introduction of more marketplaces as Amazon and Chomp decide to get themselves into the mix.
The future for applications looks interesting. Whether the Apps will totally do away with SMS services is unclear. You can now even ‘text’ each other using mobile apps (with messages delivered by Push Messaging, meaning no SMS again). However, even if Apps do destroy the world of SMS services, is that such a bad thing? If you’re stuck in a loud club and need a taxi number – does it really matter if you send your request to us by SMS or an App?
Are Mobile Ask Anything Services Still Necessary?
Posted on February 24, 2011Mobile ask anything services have been around for several years now, however, there is the question of whether they are still viable with advancing mobile technology that is readily available nowadays.
A simple response to this is ‘Yes, they are still very necessary’!
Unfortunately there are still areas with low signals, there’s often tons of information to sift through to get to your answer and there is always the issue of time! Try it – think of a question you’ve had to ask recently. Punch it into your phone’s Internet browser and see how far you get. If it takes you any longer than three minutes, then Quext has probably beat you to it!
As much as I love my iPhone, there are unfortunately downsides and getting my hands on information quickly can be a problem. I recently had to take a trip to Birmingham – the land of dreams – but unfortunately forgot to check the return train times. It was taking an age for the National Rail site to load, so I eventually gave in. I sent a quick text to Quext, sat back, drank some more coffee and within a few minutes, return travel plans were sorted.
Of course, there’s always the scenario of going out for lunch, no 3G signal and worrying about how Villa were performing. Another quick text to Quext and within a minute I found out that we were actually winning! A quick SMS to all the Birmingham City fans I know and then back to my lunch.
So when you’re stuck when out and about, just text QX and your question to Quext on 82085.
Answers are billed to your mobile at a rate of £1. Top up online and you’ll get your answers for 79p each.
Want to watch Premier League games at 3pm on a Saturday? The European Court of Justice might just be on your side
Posted on February 22, 2011The EU – and particularily the European Court of Justice (ECJ) – often gets a lot of stick. There’s a number of reasons for this. The decisions they make are technically binding on national governments – a recent example of this is the government having their hand forced to give convicted criminals the right to vote (as I write this, they are yet to concede this one). However, when called upon they can sometimes get you out of trouble – as one landlady has shown. Karen Murphy is a landlady from the UK. She got busted by the rozzers for showing Premier League games in her pub using an imported viewing card from Greece. At this point, I want to stress – it is still against UK law to show Premier League games in the UK with a foreign viewing card. So don’t do it.
Karen wasn’t happy with the £8,000 fine slapped on her by magistrates, so decided to take her case to the ECJ and tell the chaps there that showing games in the UK using a foreign viewing card is OK. Now, the case is still in progress, but a leading advisor to the court has given a pretty strong hint that she believes what Karen is saying. She is quoted as saying: “The exclusivity agreement relating to transmission of football matches is contrary to European Union law”.
Previously, the Premier League has had individual distribution rights in the various European countries and has charged the individual broadcasters accordingly. Obviously, distributors in Greece will pay significantly less than distributors in the UK. And for a while, each individual country would show Premier League games and the world was a nice, sweet and rosy place. Then some people thought to themselves – “why don’t I slap a Greek viewing card in my box and watch the Premier League?”. So, people brought Greek viewing cards, put them in their boxes and the world was still a nice, sweet and rosy place. However, the Premier League found out about this and got upset. So they started rocking up and down the country and fining people who were using these cards in the name of copyright/media property theft. However, the key to this all is the nature of European Single Market. If you want a nice big Sony TV, you can quite happily pop on a ferry over to Amsterdam, buy a tele and bring it home. This was one of the founding principles of the European Economic Community. So, the question exists – if you want to watch TV in Greece, what’s stopping you from buying it in to watch in the UK.
This, my friends, is where the ECJ advisor (the Advocate General) is on Karen’s side. As far as the AG is concerned, it is contrary to EU law to impose sanctions on the purchase of goods from other European Countries. This will make the Premier League sad. They charged Sky (well, BSkyB) around £1.8 billion last year for the rights to Premier League. Although that sounds like a lot, they raked back almost double that in subscriptions. So what is the Premier League going to do about it? It has a few options.
By far the worst of these is to simply discontinue broadcasting games in the rest of Europe. This is unlikely, but not impossible. If you imagine that Sky paid £1.8 billion for the UK rights. If the opening up of European viewing leads to Sky being massively undercut (and hence, refusing to pay such ridiculous amounts), then it may make financial sense to cut off the rest of Europe and safeguard the crazy money that Sky currently pay for the UK. They’re unlikely to follow this route – it would upset everyone in Europe who’s become accustomed to watching the English Premier League on a Saturday afternoon. Furthermore, the Premier League does make some income from these countries – many of these fans don’t watch the Premier League because there is nothing better to do. A lot of them are fans and may spend money on replica shirts, merchandise, perhaps tickets to a final.
Another option is to have one single provider for the whole of Europe. So, one company that owns the rights to the Premier League across the entire European Union. This will enable European Broadcasters to continue to show Prem games on a Saturday. However, you can bet your bottom dollar that it won’t be cheap. And importantly, as a sole provider it may well be possible for them to place clauses on the rights. For instance, they may speculate that you must not sell viewing cards outside of your home nation. There are questions about enforceability of such clauses, but the main point about a single rights holder is that they are unlikely to let the games go cheap.
Should the ECJ accept the AG’s viewpoint, then this ruling would have a profound effect on Football. Any reduction in TV revenues is likely to hit a lot of clubs in the pocket. Does this mean an end to insane transfer prices or extremely high wages?
Who knows. In fact, none of us know really – the ECJ could well reject the AG’s opinion. It’s happened before – the Justices in the ECJ don’t always go with the word of the AG. In which case, the Premier League can breathe a relative sign of relief. Even if the ECJ do accept the viewpoint of the AG, it still has to be enacted in law by courts in the UK. You can also expect appeals, complaints, judicial reviews and the like as the big boys get the wallets out and try to buy themselves some breathing space from the ECJ using lawyers whose salaries would make football players blush.
So, will you be watching the Premier League in the pub at 3pm next season? If you are, then be aware it’s probably still going to be illegal. It may take some time to get the ruling and push it through the courts and the rest of the judiciary. The ECJ itself is expected to take a good few months to come to a decision. Until then, it looks like those who show games using these foreign viewing cards are playing dangerously.
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