Multiparty chat coming back – hmmmmm

Thanks to internet chatrooms, PhonepayPlus is looking again at re-introducing multiparty chat services – ideally with less onerous prior permission and maximum spending caps than it did in 2002 – as it now perceives consumers to be safe to use them.

The services were effectively banned in 2000 because PP (or ICSTIS as it was back then) believed that consumers were too easily addicted to such services and were over-spending. Now, just a decade later, PPP believes that people are so used to internet chat rooms that they can handle multi-party chat once again – which is good of them.

PPP now believes that with the right maximum spending caps and other safe guards, that services can be run. And it wants you, the telemedia industry, to tell it how best to get these dormant services back up and running.

The interesting thing here is that why would anyone now want to run multiparty chat services since, by PPP’s own admission, most people who want to do this kind of thing are doing it largely for free in chatrooms online? Or via the many IM based services now in place? Or the myriad mobile and mobile video services now successfully running? I could go on…

Could this be a case of consumer self-regulation? Is PPP deciding to open up a once profitable service now that it knows that most consumers won’t use it?

That said, the telemedia industry is always good at grabbing an opportunity, so I look forward to seeing more multiparty chat services, via the telephone, hitting the streets in, oh, 2015 once the consultation period has run its course.

If I were to be charitable I could say that PPP is trying to offer some help to the industry in a time of crisis; offering up the possibility of some of the services from the good old days now making a reappearance because consumers are more sophisticated.

But, with virtual chat services effectively being closed down with PPP’s other hand, the cynic in me tends to win out. This is perhaps being reintroduced because no one will bother to use it.

Anyway, the proposal is out there, so go consult.

Everything changes: consolidation begins and The Thunderer starts to charge online

Happy days for MX Telecom’s Mark Fitzgerald, who sold the company to Amdocs this week for $104million in cash. Industry consolidation in action there I think you’ll agree. Whether the giant US company will ‘spoil’ good ole MX remains to be seen, but the two businesses are a pretty good fit: MX brings a good deal of European mobile payments experience to Amdoc’s OpenMarket, a nascent mobile payments hub in the US. In return, MX finally gets the traction in the US market that it has been striving for over the past few months. As I say, nice fit.

Not such happy days, however, for news consumers as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announces today that it will start charging for online news content from June – just in time for WORLD TELEMEDIA MALTA (9-11 June). So he finally did it. Users will be charged £1 for a days access and £2 for a week’s worth of right of centre, Murdoch-friendly scribing. The company also hinted that leading tabloid titles the News of the World and The Sun would follow suit.

The company is buoyed by the fact that online ABC figures are up to 1.22million daily browsers. Watch this plummet when the charges come in to force. Whether the decline will be long term remains to be seen. While there are obvious advantages for the telemedia sector around charging for online and mobile media content, experts are still divided over whether consumers will actually pay for the news online in this way.

Some believe that someone with Murdoch’s business nous won’t have done this without knowing it will work, while others – the younger end of the media watching media, it has to be said – insist that old man Rupert just doesn’t get the web and is trying to impose old print business models on the new world order. I guess we will, from about August onwards, find out who was right.

ISSUES AROUND CHARGING FOR ONLINE MEDIA CONTENT WILL BE EXTENSIVELY COVERED AT WORLD TELEMEDIA MATLA 9-11 JUNE, CLICK HERE TO REGISTER