Will Cingular Decide What News, Content You Get?
Go Mobile, Go Home: News Update from PJNet:
Would you trust Cingular or any other wireless service provider company to decide what news you get, what content you receive every day? You might have to.
I’m at the Go Mobile or Go Home conference at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.
Rick Carlson of Cingular is on a panel. He just finished saying the deliver companies are right now trying to decide what kind of content should be allowed over wireless networks. What about parental control? What type of controls should a carrier be putting up? Should it put on restrictions or let the door up to everyone?
Customers he said don’t realize that the service providers have lots of content providers. When the customer is unhappy they come to Cingular or the other wireless providers first.
Same thing with cost of cotent. If people get nailed with high priced content, they blame Cingular which delivers the bill.
He and the other panelists, John Paris of CNN and Justin Williams, most recently of the Turner Cartoon Network, agree that unlike the Internet where people expect free content, the mobile customers have been trained to pay and are used to it. So unlike the Internet, it seems more likely that content will not be free.