Indian mobile VAS to grow with utility-based applications

Telecom Lead India: The mobile VAS market has seen
significant growth in the past few years. The rate of adoption of VAS has been
higher than the rate of growth of new mobile subscribers.


However, the industry has been observing lack of
innovation in the VAS offerings.


Zubin Dubash, chief strategy officer of OnwardMobility,
said that product innovation has been lacking due to half hearted approach of
the industry.


According to Dubash, VAS applications with localized
content will augment the industry growth and one of the killer apps will be
developed with localized approach and will offer utility based services.


While talking on the same line, Sivaramakrishnan S,
director-strategy and innovation at IMImobile said that the next big innovation
in the industry will be video-oriented utility services e.g. surveillance.


Sivaramakrishnan added that entertainment video in large
is currently driving the industry growth.


Sumit Sardana, director of sales at OnMobile, said the
next big innovation in the VAS industry should be offering unified experience
to the end user.


While on the other hand Shishir Sharma, vice president of
Spice Digital said that the next big thing in the industry will be catering to
the rural region of the country.


Shishir said that services such as m-health, m-education
and m-governance will be the focus area of the VAS players.


The current Indian VAS industry can be fragmented into
two categories, one is current VAS and second is emerging VAS.


The current VAS category includes Astrology, Bollywood
and Cricket, whereas, the emerging VAS category includes Heath, Education,
Governance and Fun applications.


The current VAS category comprises Ringtones, Caller Ring
Back Tunes, SMS services like live cricket updates, Horoscope updates, Voting,
Contests and Wallpapers etc.


The category has been going strong since the inception of
VAS and will continue to do so in the near future.  The primary reason
behind the success of this category is convenience and ease of usage.


On the other hand, the emerging category comprises
mHealth, mEducation, applications which require higher bandwidth and
mGovernance.


According to IAMAI innovations in technology, penetration
of high-end smartphones will help these utility-based services to gain momentum
in the near future.


Danish Khan

[email protected]