Online video streaming service Spuul has tied up with Boku, a carrier billing and cross-platform mobile payments company to enable operator billing option for Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular customers with Tata Docomo coming on board soon. Boku had acquired Qubecell an India-based operator billing company earlier this month and with it, bought access to direct carrier billing from four different telecom operators in India. The price being paid for acquisition was not been disclosed. It needs to be noted that Spuul was working with Qubecell before their deal with Boku went through as seen in this tweet by Spuul CPO Michael F. Smith Jr. http://t.co/XtNtjjdMLs - we know how to pick them. First zencoder and now q. Startups work with spuul if you want to get bought! :) — dreampipe (@dreampipe) November 22, 2013 It's not clear what sort of a revenue share agreement Spuul has entered into considering mobile carriers take a hefty cut for billing service. Despite that, this segment has been heating up in India. Just last month, Spuul's competitor BoxTV had tied up with Fortumo for operator billing in which case it looked like the company was getting only 45% share of the revenue. New ad-supported tier Spuul has also launched a new cheaper ad-supported tier called Premium Lite, that brings down the monthly subscription rate to Rs 120. Those who are averse to ads can still subscribe to the old ad-free package that costs Rs 300 a month. However, it needs to be noted that the ad-supported tier is available only as monthly…
