Has ITV got its premium player pricing wrong?

ITV has released a new version of its ITV player for iOS, within which it offers an in-app upgrade for £3.99.

Some commentators are challenging the very notion that consumers would pay for ITV content.

Big move for ITV: £3.99 for advert-free ITV Player for 30 days. From ad-funded to user-funded is flipping the entire model. Is there demand?
— Patrick Smith (@psmith) June 12, 2013

 ITV Player Premium gives you:

• Live streams of ITV3 and ITV4 (and Live Events stream)
• No advertising around catchup programmes.

Pricing is complicated but the nub of it is that it communicates value to the customer. The consumer will view the £3.99 price tag as consisting of its two elements: ITV3 and ITV4; and 'no ads'. The consumer will attach some value to each element.

ITV3 and ITV4 have very low viewing figures: about 2.4% and 1.8% respectively, including +1 channels. The comparable figures for ITV and ITV2, are 17.0% and 2.9%. Put simply, ITV3 and ITV4 are of little value, for some zero value.

Therefore, consumers will have to consider whether they will accept paying for ITV3 and ITV4 in addition to paying to remove ads. ITV says the value of removing ads is less than £3.99. What matters is if the consumer decides that removing ads is worth more than £3.99.

Breaking: Apple responds to Google Glass with iBall

Google Glass naysayers have my sympathy. More than that, I wholeheartedly support their point of view, even though I disagree. See, when people say "that's never going to happen", they're really saying "I hope that never happens" and I, for one, sincerely hope that Google Glass never happens.

Except it's already happened.

Google Glass is not a product. Those product reviews complaining that it slips down the nose or tilts to the right or is uncomfortable, don't get the point. The privacy advocates complaining of intrusion don't understand. Google Glass is the realisation of a concept, not a piece of hardware. Of course the product design aspects aren't quite right but it doesn't take a clairvoyant to see where it's headed.

The concept I'm talking about is none other than the one that has been doing the rounds since the whole Web 2.0 malarkey got going. It's the notion of enhancing reality with a virtual overlay in order to enrich life. And is that any different to what you've been doing since the birth of the Apple App Store? Location-based services, song tagging, instant photo sharing... they're all just part of the same idea that leads inevitably to ever more biologically-proximate devices.

We're all familiar with the rush to decide an argument by checking the facts on our portable devices. How difficult it is to resist that urge to see what's new on social media! Don't we have an incessant and insatiable appetite for combining what is happening here and now with what might be elsewhere at another time?

While today it's difficult to get used to a lopsided, ugly device that slides awkwardly down your nose and whose operation depends on spoken commands, we're not so far away from effectively invisible implants that function seamlessly with our conscious minds.

So is it surprising that many people fear what Google Glass represents? And perhaps that fear will be sufficient to slow down the trajectory upon which humanity finds itself. Slow down, not halt. The Google Glass product might fail but you read it hear first, beware the Apple iBall!

Taxi app wars waging on the streets of England

Kabbee facing competition

This week I heard of yet another cab app. Minicabit revealed itself at the Wayra Demo Day, joining a line-up of taxi and minicab apps that includes Hailo, Kabbee, and Anycabs, amongst a whole bunch of others.

In my mind, the world was divided three ways:

• Hailo for instant black cabs
• Kabbee for pre-booking minicabs
• Uber, when you want a chauffeur-driven car

It seems I was wrong. There was already a bit of an overlap in the positioning since both Hailo and Uber are for immediate pick-ups, while Kabbee can also provide luxury transport and minicabs can be pre-booked for 'now'.

It turns out that the space that Kabbee seemed to occupy - pre-booked minicabs - is filled with other contenders. So I asked how do they differ from each other?

How is @minicabit different from @kabbee? Or @anycabs?
— Alex Guest (@AlexGuest) January 30, 2013

Apparently they're "all very different", says Anycabs. Here is how they each described themselves:

• Kabbee: "instant quotes covering all of London from carefully managed fleets"
• minicabit: "UK wide service that can instantly compare quotes with no wait for cabbies to bid"
• Anycabs: "users compare real-time quotes & book their licensed minicab using app or website"

So I get that Kabbee is limited to London but from the consumer's perspective, I just don't see any other substantive difference. In each case, you enter details, select a quote and book your cab. With illegal minicabs posing risks to passengers, especially lone women at night, these apps ensure that you're booking with licensed firms. So each of them is providing safety and convenience.

I had a look on the App Store and found that there are several other alternatives offering a similar service. I'd forgotten that I have previously used ubiCabs too. I can't help but think that some of these businesses should be collaborating, working off the same tech platform and pooling resources to get UK-wide coverage fast, then expanding overseas. As it currently stands, there are few barriers to entry into this market, profit margins are likely to be thin and all it takes is for one well-funded foreign competitor to turn up and upset the handsome cab.

Related articles

• How to Get Home When You're Drunk (gizmodo.co.uk)

Three reasons why people search sucks

The Tattoo Bible not by Alex Guest

I am not a holidaying establishment.

The Alex Guesthouse. Google and other search engines are inept when it comes to distinguishing between a holidaying establishment and a person.

I was not portrayed by Andie MacDowell. 

Alex (guest star Andie MacDowell)... They are rubbish at detecting punctuation that fundamentally alters the meaning of the result.

I did not write The Tattoo Bible.

And useless at evaluating two or more people sharing the same name: it is a different Alex Guest who can take credit for The Tattoo Bible.

There have been attempts to deal with this but they are all equally useless.

You think it's just me and my slightly quirky name?

A friend of mine, a doctor, shares her name with a writer, a model, a wedding photographer and a few other doctors. I can tell the difference between each of these. I could manually group the results by individual and serve up the results as clusters relating to each one. As a human, it is easy for me to tell the difference between an oncologist based in Ireland, and a writer of trashy novels, whose agent is in New York City.

Six steps to fix people search

• First, consider the links coming in and out of the page and especially links between those pages.
• Next, look for clues such as title: Dr, Mrs...
• Go further and consider some of the words that appear specifically in some results and not others. My doctor friend practices in a different field to the other doctors with the same name. Indeed, it appears that each one of them - on a quick analysis - have unrelated specialties.
• What geographical locations are referenced?
• Some names, like Alex, are given to both men and women. Look for gender clues in pronouns.
• Consider that some names are words with everyday usage: Guest, Brown, Parkinson. Alex (guest star...) should be trivial to detect as it has punctuation between Alex and guest; guest is all lower case; and guest star is a common word pairing.

Finally, the word Tattoo, an indelible mark on the skin made by inserting pigments in punctures, is clearly not the same thing as Zattoo, the live TV-streaming business for which I was the UK Country Manager.

It should not be difficult for a machine to cluster search results for individuals, yet, as far as I know, there is currently no solution that does this adequately. If you can write code and are irked by this problem, get in touch. Please.

How Instagram beat Hipstamatic to the $1 billion prize

Three weeks ago, FastCompany broke the news of a new partnership between photo app darlings Hipstamatic and Instagram, which essentially meant that Hipstamatic was the first service that could post to Instagram. The suggestion implicit in the article was that Hipstamatic and Instagram, winners of Apple's iPhone app of the year award in 2010 and 2011 respectively, should work closer, perhaps even merge.

In the short time that has passed since then, Instagram - with heavy VC backing yet not a cent of revenue - has been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, while Hipstamatic - entirely bootstrapped and profitable since the second week of its existence - is left on the sidelines (for now).

So how is it that Instagram has won, while Hipstamatic makes money?

Hipstamatic is fundamentally a camera app, which post-processes images taken with the iPhone camera, using selections prior to taking the picture. It mimics to a degree the pre-digital photographic experience, which did not (easily) allow for the manipulation of images after they'd been captured. In simple terms, you choose a film and a lens then take your picture. If you don't like the effect, you reselect a combination and retake the picture. You can share your pictures on various services like Facebook, Flickr and, now, Instagram. The app was born of a desire to recreate the cheap and unexpected effects of the original Hipstamatic, a plastic molded camera that had a very short life, and was in turn born of a love of the Kodak Instamatic. 

Instagram, meanwhile, is a social network. You take a picture and share it with your friends directly within Instagram, and cross-post to Facebook, Twitter and a number of other services. Yes, you can alter the image after taking it by selecting from a number of effects. However, that is not the main aim of the app. The name - Instagram - tells you all you need to know about the intended purpose: you use a simple image to tell the story of your occasion, instantly.

So while Hipstamatic has about 4 million users, who have paid for the app and many of whom have paid for further lenses, films and flashes, Instagram has around 30 million users, who haven't spent a single penny on it. Instagram allows you to share and see your friends' pictures easily with the app; and Hipstamatic forces you to choose the (far more sophisticated) camera filters prior to taking the picture. The ease-of-use of Instagram and the social connectivity built into it are worth far more than the sophistication of the Hipstamatic app and the clever business model.

Once again, success depends on being free, simple and connected.