Europe gets Skype Pro before rest-of-world

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

In an attempt to generate more monthly revenue from Skype users and offer them even better services like free domestic phone calls, Skype has just launched Skype Pro – and for now it’s a European exclusive!

From a price starting at just €2 per month, Skype Pro offers users ‘zero cents per minute’ calls to domestic landlines, couple with a range of premium Skype features – and they’ll throw in some discounts on Skype Certified hardware to boot.

That’s not to say that the regular Skype is going anywhere – it will remain as it is, a popular free download offering the same range of services we’re used to, including free Skype-to-Skype phone calls and video calls, instant messaging, file sending, free conference calls for us to 10 Skype users and free access to Skypecasts.

But Skype Pro offers more for a set monthly fee. Features include:

- Zero cents per minute calling to domestic landlines in the 15 countries Skype Pro is available in (see below). This was previously €0.017 per minute – and the reason why they say ‘zero cents per minute’ instead of free is because there is still a connection fee of €0.039 per call, and the possibility of VAT being added in countries where this is applicable.

- Free Skype Voicemail (which is normally €15 per year)
- €30 discount on SkypeIn numbers
- €5 Skype Credit included as part of the introductory offer (see below)
- A €30 discount on a Philips VoIP 841 cordless phone.
- A €10 discount on an SMC WiFi phone.
- Additional discounts on a series of Skype Extras are also available including desktop sharing, avatars, emoticons and ring tones

If you live in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Spain or the UK – Skype Pro is available now, with Skype promising to release it to other countries worldwide later in 2007.

So, it looks like eBay is finally getting its Skype unit to ramp up guaranteed monthly revenues by rolling services together in an attractive new package called Skype Pro which, on the face of it, looks like it will be very successful indeed.

But action on making Skype truly profitable has taken a long time. After all, eBay paid billions of dollars to buy Skype, and it’s clear that eBay’s investment hasn’t had a massive return as yet, despite the huge customer base that Skype enjoys.

So, eBay and Skype had better hurry up in making truly Skype the untouchable global standard – traditional phone companies can see all of the Skype traffic on their network and aren’t too happy about losing out on all that revenue. The introduction of Skype Pro will only hasten their plans to defeat Skype – and defend their own bottom line.
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