NEW DELHI: The Indian value added services (VAS) market suffers from the dominance of telecom operators who are very selective about content. There is a tendency of going with content like music which guarantees users and not innovative content.

These challenges have paralysed the growth of the VAS industry, according One97 managing director Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
At the third and the final day of Convergence India, speakers shared their concerns about what has put a stop to the growth of VAS in India.

Sharma further elaborated, Music is the key driver for VAS in India but there is a huge royalty charge that comes with music. Music generates $ 500 million revenue for operators while SMS contributes $ 400 million. Also, there are few high end mobile handset users and even high-end mobile handsets are available at a premium cost, which becomes unaffordable for many customers. And most importantly, the pricing for VAS services are also very high which only aggravates the problem....

BDA managing director Kunal Bajaj said, Indian telecom industry has more of pre-paid consumer as compared to post-paid which drives the growth of VAS market. Also in India, concepts like mobile payment will take time to get accepted as the process is complicated and at present it's a premium service....

Bajaj added that mobile advertising is one of the ways of generating revenue however in India it has not succeeded India as large user base. Moreover, brands are not interested in SMS advertising because SMS advertising fails to generate brand loyalty. Also telecom operator's unwillingness to share subscriber data leaves VAS operators clueless with the exact number of users to target.

Telecom operators are not open to the idea of adapting new content or even investing in content. Furthermore, the monopoly of telecom operators in terms of revenue share also leads to tiff between VAS companies and telcos. And finally pricing is a major issue for subscribers not to opting for VAS,... explained CanvasM CEO Jagdish Mitra.

Finally, while Indian VAS market has to face these challenges, one should not forget that the market is at a nascent stage and it will take some more time for the market to develop.