Novosol, a Singapore based mobile advertising and media content company, has tied up with Bharti Airtel to offer its mobile sports media services - MoCricket, MoFutbol and MoSportz to Airtel subscribers. The company intends to roll these services across various channels like WAP, MMS, Video, SMS, IVR and Apps, starting with WAP services today. While we're not sure if users would like to pay for mobile internet content, since most of it is available free on sports portals, who already have mobile websites, SMS and USSD alerts might get some subscribers hooked on. Again, operators and SMS keyword aggregators already have tie-ups with content providers, and revenue share agreements. So it would not be all smooth sailing for Novosol. However, Novosol CEO, Minhaz Lokhandwala has high hopes. He stated that they are currently targeting 150 million customers and an annual revenue of Rs 500 crore through this service. He stated that if 10% of Airtel's 180 million subscribers use this service at Rs. 1 per day, they can cross the target with ease. In return, Airtel will benefit from revenues from various channels like VAS, data revenues, P2P revenues and an increase in data & MMS service usage, thereby boosting the overall average revenue per user (ARPU) for the telecom operator. Last year, Novosol had launched its cricket service MoCricket during the ICC World Cup 2011 by partnering on Airtel and Reliance Communications to deploy it on their networks. The company had also stated it intends to extend the service to six more Indian operators by early 2012. While the portal was…
