One of the downsides of being Mobile Europe is that we don't always have an excuse to follow the global market, but I thought the following news from SK Telecom was interesting, shining a light as it does on ways of marketing and launching LTE, and services that take advantage of LTE.
It's become axiomatic that LTE doesn't bring with it "LTE services", it just brings more speed and lower latencies to existing services.
The possible exceptions to this are video calling and VoIP, but even these are available over 3G, just not with any operator backing or consistent user experience. So I think, especially in the light of EE's UK launch next week, and how Vodafone is marketing pre-4G, and its "Why does any of this matter?" question – Vodafone says there that the best thing about LTE is that it will offer a great mobile video experience – that SK Telecom's LTE launch is offering an insight into how consumers can be attracted to content offers that "leverage" LTE.
SKT has said that it now has 6 million LTE subscribers, 49 days after breaking the 5 million mark. It attributes this to what it terms "LTE-specialised services", such as T Freemium and T Baseball. T Freemium subscribers surpassed 2 million in six months after launching in April 2012, and T Baseball users exceeded 550,000 in two months since its release. So well over a third of all users have opted in to an LTE-specific content service.
So what is T Freemium? It's a service designed to enable customers to access multimedia content free of charge – or at least free as part of their tariff bundle. Subscribers at or above a certain tariff (LTE 62) sign up for the service to receive KRW 20,000 worth of points, which they can then use to purchase a range of mobile content, including films, games, applications and e-books. SKT said that the service – although still mostly actively used by customers in their 20s and 30s – is drawing in customers in their 40s and above, increasing their mobile content using experience. Is the service being used much? Well, those 2 million users have used 15 million "contents" SKT said. Let's assume that's 15 million downloads, that's an average of 7-8 per person that has signed up since launch, in a total six month period. It's no App Store, that's for sure, but there's clear evidence of an active user base.
T Baseball is a free real-time professional baseball game broadcast service for LTE subscribers. The service alerts the user to playback a certain scene (or scenes) specifically preselected by him/her to not miss a single important game moment, and also offer highlights of the game. The number of customers who downloaded the T Baseball application has topped 550,000 in two months since its release in August 2012, creating "a new trend in baseball game watching among LTE device users" according to SKT.
SKT has invested a great deal in its LTE network, deploying small cells and multi-carrier technology to provide high capacity and availability, but it is sure that simply trumpeting network quality is not enough – it has to translate that into additional services, and hence value, for users.
“SK Telecom’s LTE specialised services – designed to induce more customers to experience diverse mobile contents without having to worry about heavy costs – such as T Freemium and T Baseball are rapidly becoming a must-use service among our customers,” said Lee Inn-chan, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing Strategy Office of SK Telecom. “We expect that these services, strongly supported by the nation’s best network quality and richest device lineup, will help sustain the strong growth of our LTE subscribers, the number of which is expected to exceed 7 million by the year-end.”
