Prepaid Market

A View Point:

Untapped Potential Areas in VAS for Mobile Prepaid Market

New VAS Entrant Perspective

In the prepaid Market, there is enormous potential and one of the key areas which need lots of attention and focus from mobile operators is that of Value Added Services and Content Services domain. For a new entrant in the market who would like to startup a new business venture to tap VAS potential in prepaid market, there are ways to enter without investing much.

Backdrop

The VAS domain holds a promising potential as it is used as a vehicle by mobile operators to augment their existing product offerings. VAS by definition includes offerings by GSM mobile operators other than the core product of ‘Voice’. Predominantly all mobile operators have signed up partnerships with third party vendors for VAS. These are often labeled as content providers / aggregators or solution providers. Typically the VAS providers are solution providers who have developed in house applications or services based on different bearers i.e. SMS, GPRS / EDGE, MMS, IVR, USSD etc. Moreover, these VAS providers are also content providers or aggregators who are into developing content locally or sourcing / aggregating it from various sources by acquiring exclusive territorial copy rights from original sources. There are various types of copy rights e.g. music labels from Warner Music, Bollywood content from Sony and T-Series, cricket world Cup from PCB / ICC, FIFA soccer world cup from FIFA, news content from BBC etc. The copyrights include hefty amounts in terms of investments on part of content providers / aggregators as they outbid various contenders in open auction / bidding process. The copyrights are given out via open bidding for a limited period, e.g. typically for one year to max up to two years. Mobile operators showcase their VAS offerings via branded Web and WAP portals, STK (SIM Toolkit menus) and content catalogs.

CPA (Content Provider Access)

There is a concept of CPA...