De lights go out on SingTel’s e-mag store

SingTel’s magazine app store de!ite has become the telco’s first casualty among its digital offerings, shutting down less than two years after it was launched, BT has learnt. In response to BT’s queries, SingTel confirmed yesterday that the e-magazine store will be shuttered in June.

‘Following a review, de!ite will no longer be available from June 2012 while we explore alternative ways to offer digital magazines,’ a SingTel spokesman told BT.

The rolling up of the carpet had been in the works since earlier this year, when the magazine trade heard that de!ite would no longer be accepting new titles. Last week, another nail was driven into the coffin. One of the title owners received a termination letter for its e-magazine contract, which BT saw. The termination was to be effective 60 days from the date of the letter, which would coincide with the start of June.

As of yesterday, the de!ite app could still be downloaded on the iPad, with 42 titles available.

Launched in late-2010, de!ite had led SingTel’s charge into the app space as it sought to establish its cable-and-wire self in the ether of the digital realm. After de!ite was launched, other exclamation mark-bedecked and irregularly capitalised apps followed, like deF!ND and skoob – the book version of de!ite.

One of the publishers that used de!ite had found the experience wanting.

‘Some of their features, like the embedding of videos, didn’t work well. In an iPad magazine, even with a page-turner model, video ads should play within the magazine environment. However, when you embedded a video with de!ite, the reader would be taken out of the app and into a browser to play the video. That’s not embedding, as I understand it. And it’s disruptive,’ the publisher said.

The publisher noted, however, the de!ite had the best rates in town, in a time when its only competitor here was US-based Zinio.

While any costs incurred are bound to be but a smudge in the black ink of SingTel’s reserves, de!ite’s demise could have been a lesson in the brutal economics of online publishing.

A SingTel de!ite term sheet that BT saw gave the magazine title provider a 60 per cent cut of sales. de!ite also appears to use Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism for its app on Apple devices, which means that Apple could have taken another 30 per cent off copy sales, leaving a sliver of a margin for de!ite.

This 30 per cent levy has been a thorn in the side of other media behemoths – the Wall Street Journal and Amazon removed their in-app purchasing ability last year, while the Financial Times found a way around it by using an HTML5-based Web-only application, instead of a dedicated app.

Not all of the magazine trade is bad business. No one is sitting prettier in the e-magazine supply chain than Apple’s Newsstand, the wood-grained app on Apple devices that pulls together newspaper and magazine titles. According to a report by market research firm Distimo last month, Newsstand takes in US$70,000 a day on average from its top 100 titles on the iPad in the United States.

Its success is a partial reason for other e-magazine distributors’ failure. Newsstand creams 30 per cent off the top of magazine sales, before anyone else gets within sniffing distance.

This could sound the deathknell for smaller distributors that want to run Newsstand-based apps. BT’s sources say that an arm of a large publishing entity in Singapore has a magazine app that will run on Newsstand in the pipeline, but title owners are not giving it very good odds. This new service is offering title owners a 50-50 split of the remaining 70 per cent of sales that Newsstand lets it keep.

Effectively, title owners get only 35 per cent of the cover price if they go down this route – much less than the almost-60 per cent they get from hard copy sales and the 60 per cent that de!ite offered.

de!ite’s demise heralds a time when SingTel will have to face down corporations with which it previously had no quarrel, like Apple. Just last month, SingTel made its digital business a division in its own right, alongside its mobile business – a clear sign that it is quite prepared to return fire.

mio TV to air 3,200 hours of 2012 Olympics

Broadcast to be over 13 channels and is free for subscribers

SINGTEL’S coup of wresting ESPN Star Sports (ESS) from StarHub in 2009 might make this year a gold-medal one for the telco. Its pay TV operator, mio TV, will air more than 3,200 hours of the London 2012 Olympic Games on 13 channels because of its partnership with ESS. ESS had won the broadcast rights for London 2012 in a blanket deal for 22 countries in Asia.

This unprecedented scale of coverage will be free for all mio TV subscribers. Of the 13 channels, 10 will be dedicated to high-definition screening of the games which start in July. The other three – ESPN, Star Sports and ESPNEWS – will also provide Olympic coverage.

SingTel announced this yesterday, alongside its five-year sponsorship of the Singapore team at major Singapore National Olympic Council-sanctioned games, including the ones at London 2012.

‘We genuinely believe that the Singapore sports viewer is growing in his needs. It’s not just limited to where Singapore is playing. This trend is only going to grow,’ said Manu Sawhney, managing director of ESS.

He noted that during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, TV viewership in Asia soared 60 per cent. ‘We expect whatever viewership figures we had last time to be blown through the roof.’

The last time the Olympic games aired in Singapore, it was rival operator StarHub that dominated the broadcast, with six channels. Other things were different in 2008, too. Then, ESS had been a partner of StarHub’s before its surprise switch to mio TV in 2009.

This time around, StarHub will not be airing any of the ‘live’ competitions. Instead, its coverage will take place through CNN’s highlights and interviews, as well as BBC World News’ coverage of results and Olympic-related material such as the Olympic Torch Relay.

MediaCorp, when contacted yesterday, declined to reveal broadcast plans but said that it is ‘planning for coverage beyond TV’ and will reveal more when the ‘full communication package is ready’.

‘Bearing in mind that there is going to be so much on display, we certainly are hoping for a huge spike in the number of people who are watching this, compared to previous Olympic games,’ said Allen Lew, SingTel CEO Singapore.

SingTel is moving as fast as it can to make hay before the horizon is darkened by cross-carriage laws that were mandated last year. Under this law, any exclusive content acquired after March 2010 has to be made available to a subscriber of a rival operator upon request.

For London 2012, SingTel’s partnership with ESS still leaves StarHub out in the cold because it was inked in 2009, before the cross-carriage mandate kicked in.

Even so, the fallout for StarHub over its lack of Olympic games coverage will be muted, some believe. ‘It’s hard to imagine significant customer movement,’ said Nomura analyst Sachin Gupta. ‘Olympics will be over a few weeks and similar to the Barclays Premier League, we may see some switching, or more customers could opt for two set-top boxes. In any case, customer’s wallet share will be redistributed.’

SingTel’s multi-year agreement with ESPN Star Sports, however, expires in mid-2013, BT understands.

After that, any exclusive deal will be at the mercy of the cross-carriage law. Even as mio TV’s ESPN advantage comes up for renegotiation, so will its chokehold on the Barclays Premier League which also expires next year.

‘The Premier League will decide how they want to sell the rights for this, whether it will be an auction like last time or (by) some other means,’ said Mr Lew yesterday. ‘Traditionally, they would do it about 12-15 months before the rights expire so we expect something about the process to be announced towards Q3 or Q4 this year.’

SingTel to outplace some 500 staff

SINGAPORE Telecommunications Ltd, South-east Asia’s largest telecom firm, will lay off around 500 staff in Singapore who will then be offered jobs at a unit of China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd as part of a restructuring.

Sino Huawei Technologies Pte Ltd will then operate and maintain SingTel’s copper-based voice and data network infrastructure in Singapore for an initial period of five years starting June, SingTel said in a statement.

‘The initiative will allow SingTel to focus on core competencies such as product development, marketing and customer engagement,’ said executive vice-president of networks Tay Soo Meng.

Affected SingTel employees will be offered employment at Huawei with no change to existing roles, responsibilities, remuneration and benefits, the Singapore firm added.

SingTel, which employs around 13,400 people in Singapore, is trying to turn itself into a multimedia content provider to differentiate itself from other telecom firms that provide utility-like services. — Reuters

SingTel to outplace some 500 staff

SINGAPORE Telecommunications Ltd, South-east Asia’s largest telecom firm, will lay off around 500 staff in Singapore who will then be offered jobs at a unit of China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd as part of a restructuring.

Sino Huawei Technologies Pte Ltd will then operate and maintain SingTel’s copper-based voice and data network infrastructure in Singapore for an initial period of five years starting June, SingTel said in a statement.

‘The initiative will allow SingTel to focus on core competencies such as product development, marketing and customer engagement,’ said executive vice-president of networks Tay Soo Meng.

Affected SingTel employees will be offered employment at Huawei with no change to existing roles, responsibilities, remuneration and benefits, the Singapore firm added.

SingTel, which employs around 13,400 people in Singapore, is trying to turn itself into a multimedia content provider to differentiate itself from other telecom firms that provide utility-like services. — Reuters