5p a text...
...sounded great until the mother of a teenage girl got a 1400 pound bill for one month.
ITV says it will introduce micropayments for some web shows viewed through ITV Player, with January 2012 the most likely launch date. The idea is to show specials, or (pardon the jargon) "webisodes" of popular programmes such as Coronation Street. You can see why ITV would want to, with advertising sure to continue a long-term …
Most "free text" type promotions have a "fair use" limit of around 3000 per month. So if you're dealing with a group of eg 10-15 people who use texts the same way they would email (ie sending to all), it's more like a couple of thousand messages in a month to get that kind of bill. Which is a bit more like it.
I'm curious about how likely pay-to-play is to work with this sort of content when for the most part ITV's own accountants don't often bother with eg DVD releases or whatever. I suspect more people would be willing to pay with time (in the form of watching ads) than with actual money...
You don't have a teenage child, do you? Our first bill with texting enabled was an eye-opener, and caused strict rules to be enforced. We've now moved to an unlimited texting plan, and some months I'm convinced our teenager does nothing but text every waking moment of every day (and asleep too, since texts keep coming in at all hours of the night...) And yes, texts to groups of 10 friends at a time add up quickly...
Wouldn't it be far simpler if you had a pay as you go tarriff?
Then you'd be able to control how much money is spent on the phone and should the little darling go over the limit, then perhaps they do chores to earn money for credit?
Or is that too old fashioned a way of teaching a child the value of money and that the bank of (insert parent) is not a bottomless pit
Our daughter was on a pay as you go, for a while. It was fine when she was younger, but as she got older PAYG got a little expensive.
as my little cherub continually does well at school, working well above national average and is predicted to get A* in all of her GCSE's as a reward we decided to get her the smart-phone of her choice (Iphone), not my choice, but that's what she wanted. It costs us £25 per month for unlimited texts, loads of voice and 5gb data.... less than it was costing us in PAYG...
I can almost hear the grumbles from a lot of you, muttering about iphones for 15 year olds, but as she does well at school, never gets in trouble she deserves it... not like the little bastards who go out robbing cars and get sent on driving weekends by the courts and social services !!
boffin, because she is one
At least with this method you only pay for what you watch. With summat like Sky or Virgin your monthly subs are due no matter how much or how little of their product you watch. To put it another way, they charge the same whether they show good programmes or crappy ones. Think! which are cheaper? they're the ones that will be shown most.
By effectively having a pay-per-view setup, there is much more incentive to screen original, popular programmes than to stuff the schedules full of reality/soap/repeats/filler with one single new episode of a "blockbuster" per night.
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They are massive money spinners in other parts of the world, Asia being a prime example where they are used for all kinds like buying weapons and armour for online games. They just haven't taken off very well over here yet as people still haven't got their heads around them. When you explain that it's a bit like a pay and go mobile phone so you top it up and only use credit when you want something, most people I have spoken to think it is a very good idea.
Some people will definitely want to pay, though many might prefer a kind "season ticket" for all specials. If you have good, desirable content you have a market as ITV knows with its milking of Pop Idol on its other channels.
HBO, et al have shown that there is money in premium, subscription-based TV. Web-based micropayments have failed largely because the user experience is so shit but PPV for sport is successful.
But ever less so:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/jul/11/coronation-street-drop-in-viewers
Still I'm sure some of the remaining 7.1M shuffling, boss-eyed soaptards will be queuing up, credit cards in hand, to pump cash into the ITV coffers. Unfortunately, given the intelligence level required to be entertained by this tardovision Dan Brownian Manc cockwash, the best they'll probably manage is to push their card into one of the ventilation slots on the side of their PC loosing it forever and dribble into the keyboard until the whole thing shorts out.
Still, it will keep them entertained in the advert breaks in Loose Women.
i don't know much about coronation street but isn't it watched mostly by old people? the kind who are mystified and vaguely unnerved by computers at the best of times never mind when its asking them for payment details. last i heard its viewing figures were going down hill pretty rapidly so maybe now isn't the ideal time to be asking people to pay money to watch some of it.
maybe this would work for hollyoaks if they could find a way to stop the viewers smashing their monitors trying to grab stuff out of them and ruining their keyboards with their constant dribbling.