An interesting report in the latest issue of Mobile Media newsletter (sub. req.): Vodafone UK has admitted to making errors in its reporting of content sales to revenue-share partners. Yes, really. The story quotes a source saying that Voda is one of the worst culprits among
UK carriers when it comes to inaccuracies in the content-revenue statements sent to partners each month.
Some problems: the omission from statements of the profit made from a particular short code; at times, the operator’s billing system has crashed, leaving it unable to report on any revenues at all, the story says.
In a related story, also in MM, some media companies are deploying revenue-assurance and -settlement systems to ensure that they’re not being short-changed. With multimedia content coming into picture, the billing and rev-share system becomes even mroe complex: music, TV and film footage have long value chain of royalty charging artists and producers/publishers, as well as other fee-charging partners.
Valista, a vendor in this space, is installing mobile-revenue-settlement engines –which automatically account for and direct the revenues for content sold on mobile networks – for a handful of unnamed big media companies and for some mobile transaction aggregators, such as M-Blox, the company says, though it won’t give more details.