What's to Come

What's Wrong With This Model!?

In a recent article in Brandweek titled Sprint Users Can Get 'Primped' a show provided through GoTV is provided to Sprint mobile customers for $6.99/month with no ads, but with product placement embedded in the video.

I'm sorry, but I don't get it! The customer will pay $6.99 and they're charged for air-time and they're exposed to product placements. I don't see the model working! I suppose it's a little like pay-per-view where you pay a cable subscription, a per-event charge and still have to see the product placement or branding on the boxing ring. It seems to me that the carrier, and the producer of the show stand to gain much more by driving more people to watch over their phones if they reduce the financial burden on the customer. Why charge for the content? Let the sponsors pay the bill and give it to the customer for free (relatively!). This way you drive up the bandwidth use which should help the carrier and drive up the number of viewers which creates value for the advertisers who pay for the programming.

Someone in the value chain is getting greedy and with the number of choices consumers have, I suspect the results will be very disappointing.

-Andy

posted by Andy Huckaba @ 3:51 PM