Reading List: Music ‘Comes with Fees’; P2P-Hearing, Take Two; Truphone Funding
- Nokia is apparently paying one label (Universal) $35 per year per user in order to deliver
its all-you-can-eat “Comes With Music” service. The Hollywood Reporter does the math:
Nokia last year sold 437 million phones and could sell around a half-billion this year. If, say, 1% of 500 million phones carry the Universal tie-in, that’s $175 million in Universal’s pocket. If it’s 10%, Universal walks home with $1.75 billion.
Are service providers ready to pony up that kind of cash? Better be ready to at least check out this kind of deal or watch a handset maker turn the iTunes-applecart on its head without you. This as Verizon and AT&T execs used the NAB show to talk up closer relationships with broadcasters.
- Comcast feels the pain of ticking off one of the world’s most popular bloggers, Dave Winer. What I found most interesting: 1) with PowerBoost, he was getting 28 Mb/s download! 2) they cut off his service because he was consuming too much bandwidth; fair enough, but they told him after the fact 3) a few years ago, Winer said he wrote about a bad Travelocity review that ended up being the number 1 Google hit for the brand (uh oh!) 4) Comcast apparently has an employee (Frank) monitoring Tweeter for complaints (under the name Comcast Cares).
Bottom line: service providers separate themselves from Web competitors by actually providing customer service (especially via phone); irony is that customers are using the Web to keep customer service in check.
- The FCC is holding its second public meeting on P2P traffic shaping at Stanford University (PDF) later this afternoon. You can listen to it streaming here. We’ll file a report later this afternoon. Note: no service providers on the panels, not even Comcast, which makes it hard to take this too seriously as anything more than a gripe session.
- Truphone, which we covered in our New Service provider feature, landed $33 million series B financing, which they’ll using to build out their network (yes, the run at least part of their own backbone while leasing key portions) and, according to what Truphone’s James Body told me at VON, to make a rather significant retail push. Are consumers ready to buy a Truphone at Best Buy? Might be a tough sell sitting next to all those shiny smartphones they stock these days.
Here’s some interesting details on Truphone’s backbone from their funding press release:
The company has developed a carrier-grade, global operator infrastructure including a global network of SIP gateways, a Nokia Siemens Networks mobile network Home Location Register (HLR) and a GSM identifier. The infrastructure is capable of supporting 40 million customers worldwide. This is all enabled by a series of global agreements with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers.
