The Mobile VAS Ecosystem on a Page

Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

The Mobile VAS Ecosystem on a Page

Last month, I wrote about the Mobile VAS Ecosystem and I was asked a few questions about this topic. I figured the best way to answer these questions was to show this slide and then explain the slide.

First of all, Value Added Services (VAS), in the context of what I’ve been writing about for a long time, are services that consumers would be willing to pay extra for, and would be network-based services. So as you can see below, services like CRBT, SMS, LBS, Conferencing and Commerce would be considered a VAS.  Regarding paying “extra,” in some cases a subscriber would indeed pay extra (like for a conference call) but in some cases these are “included” in a bundled price (like texting). But either way, they’re additional services above a basic voice or data plan. Also, in some cases, voice when added to text or social networking, is a VAS. But downloadable games in this context are not a VAS.

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These services are increasingly being video-enabled. Some are even purely video, such as video monitoring kinds of services. Others are just different services that are neither video nor voice. For instance, in the US, we’re seeing commercials about using your phone to shut off lights and other appliances in your house.  A couple of years ago in the Dialogic corporate video, we actually had some of these “futuristic” services contemplated in that video. Continued innovation is also important.

Anyway, typically, a company who is focused on providing such services creates these services (using Dialogic components underneath). What I have on this slide are the companies who are in the Dialogic Solution Showcase. These companies would then sell these services directly to the service provider or offer them through a network system integrator such as NSN or Ericsson.

These services are then sold to you, the consumer. 

One thing I didn’t put in the picture here, but which is also key, is the concept of obtaining and using the content. That is, if 3rd party licensable content is required to be used in a value-added mobile service (say music, or movies, or TV shows) then either the service provider or the company creating the service needs to make agreements with the content creator to use this content, even if it’s only snippets. Also, content aggregators have emerged that make the agreements with the various licensable content creators and owners. This way, the service provider or the company creating the service can make a single agreement with the content aggregator and not with hundreds of different companies. The content aggregator’s value is in providing time savings and legal right to use the content.

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