CTAM EUROSUMMIT ’10 – BUDAPEST. Value Added Services (VAS) can help reduce churn for cable operators. Number 1 of these is VoIP telephony, internet security comes second and online gaming third.
For Giorgi Avaliana, product development and management broadband at Virgin Media, VAS is absolutely an asset in the very competitive UK market, where speed and price have driven the market, to help “fight commodisation of the pipe. VAS has helped to shift consideration away from speed and price, and it has improved tier up-sell and churn performance.” Products offered by Virgin are PC security, backup and storage and digital photo prints.
In the upcoming battle for the connected home Avaliana sees a good future for Virgin, “We own the relationship with the customer, we have billing and provisioning and are the enabler in the home. We offer super fast connectivity, multi-screen and specialise in content and entertainment. Of course there are new brands vying for a share of the digital home, but customers are looking for reassurance and guidance.”
Faisal Galaria, corporate & business development at the online music service Spotify, told the audience about the first deal the company has done with cable operator Telia. “We are the biggest paid for music service, now active in seven markets during the past two years. We have 500,00 paying users, 7 million users in total of the free and paid for service and a library of 8 million tracks.”
Spotify has contracts in place with all record labels and has cleared all rights. The basic service is ad-supported, which gives the right to 20 hours of streaming music on the desktop. There are pay plans for mobile usage and the contract with Telia has brought Spotify to the STB.
“This is a different service than that on the PC, it is a lean back experience, people are not going to perform a search on their TV set, they just want to sit back en listen to the music. Telia is the first cable partner we have. Our advantage is that we require no heavy tech investment, we supply all backend solutions and offer a co-branded turn-key solution with compelling pricing. And we can help reduce churn because we are a differentiator in the market.”
