Carriers Still Struggle with Mobile Content Providers

Carriers are still struggling in relationships with third-party carriers, and are beginning to use a cash-based carrot-and-stick strategy to smooth things over, RCR Wireless News reports.

Earlier this year, Sprint began to formally tie revenue shares to business practices, saying that anyone who violates Mobile Marketing Association guidelines (such as by incurring high refund rates or not reporting billing errors) can forfeit profits and lose their assigned short codes. Now other carriers are implementing similar policies.

“What we’re seeing is the carriers getting more sophisticated—they want to reward the content providers who market their wares honestly and deliver them efficiently,” said Jay Emmet, general manager of the Amdocs subsidiary OpenMarket, in the report. The flip side of this issue, of course, is doing something like what Apple does with the iPhone, requiring everything to go through the iTunes Store—which places heavy limits on the kinds of things mobile content providers can even offer.

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