'Piracy affects innovation in the VAS market'

What are the issues relating to the value-added services market?

The issues in the value-added services (VAS) market from the operator side
include the high handedness of the operator community. VAS is growing to become
an industry in itself but it's not getting due credit in terms of revenue
share that we are getting. Other issue is that we say that VAS is all about
ideas and when we talk of ideas, it's a very good innovation to engage a
subscriber in an application and increasing revenue of the operator. But there
is no patenting, IPR, copyright or DRM, so there is a lot of copying and piracy
and all efforts of producing an innovative product go to waste.

-Saket Agarwal, COO, Cellebrum

What steps should be taken to effectively curb content piracy?

On the handset side, there are already initiatives taken by the manufacturers,
which is allowing something like DRM software on the handsets which stops the
transfer/ forwarding of an application or content from one phone to another.
There is a copyright and patenting government body but the amount of time it
takes to get something patented does not solve the purpose and VAS is low on
government radar. We need to educate people about IPR and what would happen if
they don't adhere to that. Thus awareness is needed in both Service provider
and developer community.

Which of the value-added services are most affected by piracy?

I think it's whichever is the most popular service today. Every service, which
is introduced by one service provider and becomes a success is copied by others,
be it caller tunes launched some time back or background tunes launched
recently.

How much do you think piracy is affecting the VAS industry?

Piracy critically affects the innovation aspect of the VAS market. Every
developer allocates a certain percentage of its revenue to innovation and if
revenue is not optimum, then innovation will suffer, leading to fewer
applications being developed, thereby crippling the whole industry.

What would be the future of VAS once piracy is curbed? How will 3G help in
checking piracy?

The VAS market will grow anyhow but with piracy taken care of, the growth rate
will be much higher. VAS is a premium service and the moment every one starts
getting their fair share, the prices are going to come down and the market would
grow in volumes leading to exponential growth of the VAS market.

3G will provide content providers additional bandwidth, enabling them to be
able to load DRM software with the application and it will be easily
downloadable by the subscribers there by making content piracy a next to
impossible job.

Sonia Sharma