ME's Tim Green went to Vegas and unsurprisingly money was at the top of the agenda...
What lies at the heart of a content company's every move? The desire to provide a great customer experience? No. What then? Getting people to pay money for your stuff, obviously.
But as we all know, payment is no longer the simple bit at the end of a seduction process that leaves the consumer desperate for what you've got. It used to be.
I'm old enough to remember when you would pull shiny 'coins' out of your pocket and hand them to a bad tempered man in a corner shop in order to get sherbet [Is that what you call it? – ed].
Bit since we've gone digital, billing has got so much more complicated. In the mobile content space, billing used to mean reverse SMS which, when you think about it, couldn't have been worse suited to the task. Want to charge £9? That'll be three messages then, each one requiring lots of clicks from the customer.
Then came operator billing. Not bad from the customer's point of view, but hellish to integrate for off-portal providers. Lately, we've seen credit cards and e-wallet-type ideas come into play, each with their own unique challenges.
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Last week at CTIA the focus, as expected, was on app stores, what with RIM finally launching its App World and Nokia cranking up the PR on Ovi, which lands in a month. Although each has many fascinating issues to solve as the battle begins with Apple’s App Store, it's the ho-hum old question of billing that seems to me to be the deal breaker.
RIM has launched its store with PayPal but as of now you cannot sign up for the service on a device. And although I'd assumed most BlackBerry users would be PayPal-registered, I was shocked when one key content provider admitted that he wasn't – and that he was not impressed with the move. Can there be a BlackBerry user alive that doesn't have a credit card? It weird. Although, we can assume RIM will offer credit card support eventually, but it's a way off.
Meanwhile, Ovi does support credit cards although Nokia is working hard on operator billing because it recognises, quite rightly, that millions of its users don't have Visa and never will.
But Nokia also concedes it's a struggle. The firm admitted to me that when Ovi Store launches there may be some operators who don’t support it as far as payments are concerned. And if customers of those operators don't have a credit card, they will only be able to download free stuff from Ovi. It could cause some confusion.
Funny to be in Vegas for CTIA and to end up cogitating in a hotel room about billing. Honestly, readers, I was only cogitating. Still, I don't think it's what Bugsy Siegel had in mind when he conceived this ghastly city in the desert – the only place in the world where you can find an Elton John shop.
No one wants to look like Elton John. Not even Elton John.
