London conference panel tells all.
The first of two panel sessions at ME's Monetising Mobile event in London focused on mobile app business models, with Nicholas Lovell from Gamesbrief, David Gibbs from Sky, Charles Damen from Mach, and Charles McLeod from Metaflow.
The conversation started with carrier billing, with Damen saying that "With the App Store, Apple has shown carriers how billing should be done."
How? Because users can buy apps with a couple of taps, and get billed direct to their credit cards. Mach is trying to help operators emulate Apple's system, and also to help developers to bill from within their apps.
Lovell was up next, talking about free and freemium models. "Free is a marketing technique, it's not a business model, and it's no longer the easy-win marketing technique it was when it first came out," he said, referring to the App Store.
He gave the example of iPhone game FaceFighter, from US developer Appy Entertainment. It was a paid game, but Appy then took it free for two weeks and racked up more than a million downloads.
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That was then used to cross-promote a newer game, Tune Runner, taking it into the top three of the App Store's music games category.
"Free is a very powerful marketing technique, when you use it right," said Lovell, saying it's particularly good for developers without a big marketing budget. "If you don't have money, free is a brilliant strategy."
Over to Gibbs from Sky, who talked about his company's mobile activities.
"Mobile is now very much part of our core offering," he said. "You can watch the football on HD at home, on your PC, your Xbox, your iPhone and Android or Nokia device... We're now in a position where we can deliver that."
He also gave out a stat: "We have more than a quarter of a million people paying a monthly subscription to watch TV on their phones."
However, Sky also sees mobile as a marketing opportunity: people can pay to watch it on their phones, and this may turn them into paying Sky customers at home too.
Gibbs also talked about Sky starting to sell mobile in as a benefit to advertisers, rather than just bunging it on to existing deals - something that will be seen in its upcoming World Cup activities.
A question from the audience asked Lovell whether the big games industry firms are making profits from mobile yet.
"My fear is with a lot of these new platforms... people like EA bring traditional techniques to the development for these platforms," he said, while accepting that EA is making a lot of money from its mobile games activities.
Gibbs was asked about the iPad: will it be very important for Sky, and is it a game-changer? "We shall see," he replied.
"Game-changer? No. Not for us... It's a coffee-table device, you go home and pick it up. For a media or entertainment company it's very interesting. But at the moment it's an interesting niche. I spend a lot of time at the moment being asked what we're doing on the iPad. If we're not careful, we might just jump ahead of ourselves. There's a lot more we can do on the smaller device."
And: "It's an expensive kind of toy isn't it. 3G - you're asking people to spend another £25 a month on top of their broadband and mobile bill? It's a big ask. I might be completely wrong..."
The panel also talked about the balance between big brands and publishers, and smaller indie developers in the apps space. "There is a role for both," said Lovell.
Why do people focus so much on the iPhone? "That's where the usage is," said Sky's Gibbs.
"Also it's the easiest thing to sell internally. You can drop it on the desk and work out how to use the service within seconds. With other devices, it's more complicated."
However, he pointed out that Sky News is now available for iPhone and Android, but also has a mobile website.
"You have to focus on volume, and then work out how best to explain it to customers on those other platforms."
