Topic: Partnerships
Major US Wireless Carriers Band Together to Solve SMS-Based 2FA Security (Sep 8, 2017)
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Snapchat Adds Content From College Newspapers With Ads for Monetization (Sep 8, 2017)
Business Insider reported a few weeks back that Snapchat was starting to approach college newspapers about contributing content to its Discover tab, and now the company has made it official. Critically, Snapchat will run ads in those Stories, which will allow the newspapers to make some money from the partnership, so this should be something of a win-win for both sides. As I mentioned in my first comment on this (linked above), Snapchat is here going in the opposite direction from Facebook, which started out college campus-based and expanded from there, but the college age audience is clearly a big part of Snapchat’s target demographic, so it makes a ton of sense to provide increased localization and more content to keep users in the app longer (and see more ads). I’m very curious, though, to see how effectively newspapers make the transition to the format required in the Discover tab – I’m guessing most of the contributors will at least be familiar with the form, but it’s very different from writing articles.
via Snap
Facebook Fact-Checking Partners Say Lack of Data Sharing Impedes Work (Sep 7, 2017)
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Lyft Partners with Drive.ai to Test Autonomous Cars in Bay Area This Year (Sep 7, 2017)
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Spotify Adds Hulu to $5 Per Month US College Student Subscription (Sep 7, 2017)
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★ T-Mobile Announces Free Netflix for Family Plan Subscribers (Sep 6, 2017)
T-Mobile today announced its latest “Un-Carrier” move today, in one of its simplest and certainly its shortest announcement so far: it’s offering free Netflix subscriptions to subscribers to its family plans. Specifically, the offer is available to subscribers who have at least two paid voice lines on the T-Mobile One plan introduced in August last year. That’s now the standard plan for new customers, but many existing customers will be on older family plans and will need to switch to those plans, which may cost more than those offered previously. Typically, two paid lines will be $120 per month with taxes and fees included, so the annual benefit of this offer is equivalent in value to a month’s wireless service. T-Mobile has just over 12 million postpaid accounts at the moment, with an average of just under 3 lines per account, so that gives some sense of the addressable market here, although many would need to switch to T-Mobile ONE to qualify. For Netflix, the upside is smallish – a few million potential new customers over the next few years – but low risk, with these subscribers likely having lower churn.
Certainly not all of those lines would qualify today, but assume that a quarter of those accounts eventually take the Netflix offer, and it ends up being about $90 million per quarter at the full $10 price, which I’m guessing Netflix isn’t paying. More realistically, at 80% of the full retail price, the cost to T-Mobile would be closer to $70 million on a revenue base of roughly $10 billion in revenue per quarter, so the cost is likely to be far from material for the company. Conversely, the Netflix offer will likely increase loyalty and therefore reduce churn and the costs associated with it, and drive more people to the T-Mobile ONE plans and thereby increase ARPU in at least some cases, so T-Mobile will not unreasonably be hoping the net effect on margins is positive.
This move is just the latest in a long string of Un-Carrier moves from T-Mobile, the vast majority of which have been fundamentally about the price or cost of service, either discounting services or throwing in freebies, while dressing the moves up as being something more. That’s clearly worked for T-Mobile, as it’s been by far the fastest growing postpaid phone operator in the US over the last several years, and this move is likely to provide a further little boost, though not a massive one. And of course it’s worth noting that AT&T has been offering free HBO to some of its unlimited subscribers for a while too, so T-Mobile certainly isn’t the first to offer a bundle, but Netflix has broader appeal in the US than HBO and the requirements to qualify are less stringent on the T-Mobile plan.
via T-Mobile
★ Xiaomi Announces Mid-Tier Android One Phone with Google (Sep 5, 2017)
Google’s Android One project for emerging markets was launched in 2014, and focused on countries in the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia. But it’s appeared to be struggling, with little recent positive news from vendors supporting it in those countries. In addition, at its I/O developer conference this year Google announced a project internally called Android Go, which is focused on optimizing Android for low-cost devices and therefore seemed to be in somewhat the same vein. But the funny thing about Android One is that’s it’s been morphing somewhat from a project for the low end of the Android market to one more targeted at the mid market. There have been several Android One phones through Sharp in Japan since mid-2016, and now Xiaomi is announcing a device. which seems at least in part targeted at India.
The most interesting thing about Xiaomi as a partner is the fact that it’s always majored on its proprietary UI – MIUI – as a differentiator for its devices, and it’s arguably that the fairly locked-down Android One was intended at least in part as a response to Android OEMs’ customizations, so this is certainly a departure for Xiaomi. As with the Japanese phones, though, this one is also targeted at the mid-market, selling for a little over $200, with 80% of handsets sold in India below $200. So it’s a poor fit for the original focus of the Android One project, which is arguably now being taken over by the Android Go initiative, but indicative of what Android One is evolving into. The big question is whether the device will actually sell, given that a Xiaomi phone without MIUI is a tougher sell and there are plenty of other cheaper Android phones in the countries the companies are targeting with this one. There’s certainly no guarantee Android One does any better in India at $200 plus than it did at $100.
via Bloomberg
Microsoft And Samsung Partner to Cross-Promote Xbox One X and QLED TVs (Sep 1, 2017)
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Google Assistant Coming to More Speakers, Will Control Appliances (Aug 30, 2017)
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Apple Adds Accenture as Latest Enterprise Partner for iOS (Aug 29, 2017)
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Microsoft Offers Additional Details on Mixed Reality Headsets (Aug 28, 2017)
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Uber Reports $50m in Tips Paid, More Controls and Flexibility for Drivers (Aug 22, 2017)
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Google is Working on Subscription Tools for News Publishers (Aug 18, 2017)
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NBC’s Daily Snapchat News Show has had 29 Million Unique Viewers (Aug 18, 2017)
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Google Might Pay $3.5 Billion to Samsung and $3 Billion to Apple in 2017 (Aug 16, 2017)
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Fiat Chrysler Joins BMW-Intel-Mobileye Alliance for Autonomous Driving Systems (Aug 16, 2017)
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★ Apple is Talking to Aetna About Apple Watches for Insurance Customers (Aug 14, 2017)
CNBC reports that Apple has recently held discussions with insurance company Aetna about providing Apple Watches on a subsidized basis to at least some of its 23 million customers. Aetna already has a program to provide Apple Watches to its employees, and both Apple and Fitbit have been talking to a variety of healthcare companies about partnerships to get wider distribution of their devices. This is the first real sign that Apple might do a deal which would be much larger in scale than anything that’s been contemplated so far. For context, Apple has likely sold just over 30 million Watches in total so far, so getting Watches to even half of Aetna’s members would be a massive boost to the business. Such a deal would likely see Apple supplying Watches at less than the usual retail price, both as a bulk discount and because the cost of acquisition would be much lower than a typical retail purchase, while Aetna would subsidize the remaining cost for its members on the basis that fitness trackers tend to improve health and fitness and therefore lower the odds of a medial issue that requires insurance coverage. The rationale there would be much the same as for insurers providing discounted gym memberships. Partnerships like this with medical providers probably have more potential than anything else to boost the addressable market for fitness-centric wearables, including the Apple Watch, because they substantially lower the cost of entry for consumers while providing strong incentives to make use of the devices. There’s obviously no guarantee any of this gets done, but it’s the kind of thing I’m sure we’ll see at least on a small scale in the near future, whether with Aetna and Apple or other pairings.
via CNBC
Toyota, Ericsson, Intel, and Others Form Consortium to Manage Car Data (Aug 11, 2017)
Toyota, Ericsson, Intel, NTT, and other companies have formed a consortium to figure out ways to manage the massive explosion of data that will be generated by cars over the coming years. As cars become more autonomous, they will need to gather enormously more data from cameras, radar, LIDAR, and other sensors and transmit at least a subset of that data over networks to central repositories for processing and analysis. That, in turn, is going to require some big decisions about which data to process locally, what needs to be sent over the air, and how much and which data to store on an ongoing basis in both locations. Since carmakers like Toyota don’t really have much experience with that kind of thing, network infrastructure vendor Ericsson and chip vendor Intel among others are going to work together with them to figure some of this stuff out, and have left the door open for others to join their effort in future. Notably absent from this initiative are other big automotive chip vendors like Nvidia, any cloud service companies beyond Japan’s NTT, or mapping companies like HERE, and given the strong roles they’re playing or likely to play in this area, the consortium does need to add additional members (including ones who compete with the founding members) if it’s to make real headway here.
via Toyota
Facebook Announces List of Shows Created for its New Watch Video Tab (Aug 10, 2017)
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Lyft is Partnering with Healthcare Providers to Give Patients Rides (Aug 4, 2017)
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