Considering the news from Boku & Fortuma, looks like carrier billing is about to pick up.
Sony brings carrier billing to the PS3 in the US with Boku partnership
boku mobile
Fortumo Brings Direct Carrier Billing To India
PlayStation a Sony product will allow users to purchase of downloadable games, add-ons, themes, movies and TV shows and subscriptions to the Music Unlimited service, and subscribers to select U.S. mobile network operators will be able to access the payment method.
It is a 3 step process:
Users are asked to choose Payment Method as “Mobile” User need to add Mobile Phone Number System Sends SMS to user & user has to Respond via SMS to confirm top-up.The charges are directly added to mobile phone bill & it works as a prepaid account.
Sony expects mobile payments would increase the overall experience and sales of its digital goods. Sony is inclined to adopt new method of payments for smaller micro-payment transactions. This opens gates for selling different kind of digital content to consumers.
Fortumo announced its partnership with Airtel, Vodafone, Idea & Tata Docomo in India. This is a big achievement to enter second largest population country with billions of phone users, infact more phones than people in the country. Furtumo’s direct carrier billing solution enables users to pay without using SMS, which is faster & increases adoption.
It would be interesting to see how Fortumo is able to change the Indian gaming market in-game payments. Even though there is a big potential to generate transactions important thing would be to see how consumer experience & adopt the new way form of payment. In past it has been observed Indian gaming consumers & industry itself don’t feel need for any sophisticated mobile micro-payments for gaming industry.
Some interesting insight being shared in this report, the research company Gyan estimates that revenues from mobile gaming in India will reach 574 million USD by 2016. If this is the case for India, it looks both companies Boku & Fortumo have a promising future.