Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Telstra says its BigPond News service “covers national,
entertainment, sport, world, politics, technology, environment, health,
weather and odd-spot topics, including a six month archive of stories.”
Telstra says it has also given special
attention to “business and finance coverage with hourly video market
updates during trading hours and extensive market data”, with all these
categories supporting “RSS news feeds so the latest headlines from each
section will be available instantly in a news reader.”
It looks pretty comprehensive, although presumably Telstra is simply
licensing news content from the standard news providing sources, which
is how it can put together a rich news site with lots of stories and
videos very quickly, and without any actual journalists.
Telstra also mentions its BigPond Live News service, a separate news TV
channel. This is actually a rebadged “Sky News Australia” feed, with
the BigPond logo super-imposed, with the main news and other headlines
on a continuing, updated loop.
When live news breaks, the updated feeds go direct to whatever Sky News
is broadcasting, be it a sermon from Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin
Rudd, or some other important national or international event.
Although the BigPond web version of the service, is free and unmetered
for BigPond users, and free for users of other ISPs (aside from the
fact your ISP won’t unmeter the video downloading), Telstra also has a
mobile version for its Next G and 3G customers, at AUD $4.95 per month,
$1.95 for a “day pass” or 50c for a news bulletin. Clearly if you
intend watching a lot of BigPond Live News on your Telstra mobile, the
$4.95 monthly pack is the cheapest option.
Telstra’s Milne said that: “Since October 2007 we have experienced a
near five-fold increase in visits to our BigPond News section on
Telstra Next G mobiles as customers catch-up on the latest news as they
travel to and from work or while they are out and about on the weekend.”
To show how popular the service can be, especially when live news
breaks, Telstra noted that “on the day of the 2008 US Presidential
Elections, there was a sixfold increase in streams of the BigPond Live
News service on Next G mobile phones and an 829 per cent increase in
streams online.”
So, the CoolIRIS service is a nice graphical interface and fun to play
with, but once the novelty wears off you might find the BigPond News site itself a simpler and faster to get to the news.
David Bass
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