The “Quad-play” opportunity, sky follows too, but where will digital media strategy go next?

The catch-up announcement by sky entering the quad-play market of package of pay-TV, broadband, fixed line and mobile is a direct result of the massive shift towards consumers expected discounted bundles of digital services in one place. It makes economic sense in that they have the “pipe and access” to your home or mobile. This illustrates many features of the digital economy and in particular the idea that customer loyalty is not some much the brand name but to the ecosystem of services an, community of common social interests that build loyalty to your service. Even with contract lock-in the ability to switch providers is literally a click away, making your offers more “stickie” is critical in creating a richer customer experience.

Building multi-sided markets

The impact of digital technology on the media industry includes the ability to create multi-sided marketplaces, its something Amazon has known for years and having establishing a very successful backbone of cloud computing and a marketplace store that sells ad trades multiple products and subscription models that offer a kind of “eat all you can buffet” in selected product categories. This is a phenomenon of two-sided marketplaces such as apple pay and multi-sided marketplaces that increasing offer a “one stop shop” experience as a broker and aggregator of products and services.

The fact that sky’s rivals BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk have already done this is telling in the sense that the telecoms providers have already woken uo to their changing role in the Connected economy. Sky isn’t a telecoms provider, and with netflicks and Amazon prime to YouTube and others offering video streaming it is becoming a rock and a hard place to keep selling and pricing competitively.

The quadplay is a “classic” digital monetization mechanism of re-intermediation of content in an attempt to disintermediate competitors to direct traffic to their web sites and bundles.

Where next for digital media? Its not just their market now?

But this trick of bundling is not a unique strategy and can be copied with the right platform and investment strategies. Google, Microsoft, facebook and others are building platforms that also seek to offer bundling of media content. Then in other industries this is being horizontalized as we see retail, financial services, government citizen services, transport , hotels and so on, also getting into the move from as-a-service to platform-as-a-service. Being able to move products and services into a multichannel or Omni-channel experience needs a clear platforming strategy to manage two, three, quad or any number of services to customers and the supply chain ecosystem supporting it.

This is a high stakes game that is seeking to spend and build customer communities, you only have to see the issues of uber in china losing the race to the bottom and pulling out, or the rise of Airbnb and a range of social media apps that are now common place all vie for our precious attention in the 24 hours of a day.

These are the new battlegrounds of the digital spaces that will drive the new connected economy value propositions and beyond into A.I. and augmented services, buts that’s another story.

#BSkyB #sky #Digital #Multichannel #multisidedmarkets