Posts Tagged Word On The Street

Why Sprint’s iPhone 5 gamble is not that crazy

Posted by on Tuesday, 4 October, 2011

The word on the street is that Sprint is betting the farm on an exclusive for the iPhone 5. It will commit almost billion to Apple for 30.5 million iPhones and it won’t even start to make money till 2014. Crazy? Yes and no!

Apple has to love this deal–it basically ensures a nice revenue stream for them, even if the world goes into recession and demand for mobile phones stalls. Second, it takes away some of the Android momentum at one carrier where Android has done well. (I know T-Mobile wants an iPhone too, and too bad they are not getting it.) Now for Sprint, I agree there are risks, but they are calculated risks. The exclusivity of iPhone 5 to Sprint is what reduces the risk around this arrangement.

For starters, globally, the average revenue per user for iPhone is about 1.5 to 2 times the average ARPU for all other phones. The numbers are better in the U.S. On an average, in the U.S., average revenue per user for iPhone is about a month, according to Chetan Sharma, principal at Chetan Sharma Consulting. That works out to about ,080 a year.

Now if  Sprint manages to match Verizon’s performance (it added 2.2 million iPhones during the first two months of the launch of the iPhone 4) during the first six months and another million iPhone users in the next six months, it can attract about 3 million iPhone customers to its roster. I am presuming these will be new customers who would switch to Sprint because of the “exclusive” availability of the device on the Sprint network, or they are fed up with AT&T or Verizon.

That works out to about .2 billion in revenues. And given that analysts estimate Sprint to clock in revenues of around billion in 2012, what we are talking about a nice 10 percent bump in revenues for the company. The presence of the new iPhone would also reduce the churn on Sprint’s network and thus would provide the much-needed stability to their revenue stream.

So as I said –crazy yes, but not completely loco!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  • Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunities
  • U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
  • Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&T



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PSP2 To Be Announced At E3, According To Publishers [Gaming]

Posted by on Thursday, 13 May, 2010

PSP2 To Be Announced At E3, According To Publishers [Gaming]

Posted by on Thursday, 13 May, 2010

What could be better than watching MLB games on your PS3?

Posted by on Friday, 23 April, 2010

Back in my day a video game console was a video game console. Now? They’re all over the place. The latest example: Sony has inked a deal with Major League Baseball to bring live baseball games to a PS3 near you.

No price has been announced for the service. Plain ol’ MLB.tv costs you $100 per year, or $20 per month. HD costs extra. I guess the league has to pay for those fancy camera somehow.

I think in the UK you can watch Sky Sports live on the Xbox 360, and word on the street is that Microsoft is, or has been, trying to convince Disney to send over ESPN programming to Xbox Live.

Not sure I understand the point of this, but if it floats your boat, eh, no harm there.

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Crytek ‘working closely’ with Microsoft, Sony re: motion controls

Posted by on Friday, 16 April, 2010

Pretty sure Crytek, of Crysis fame, is usually associated with blazing fast graphics cards and extreme edition processors, so color me surprised to see it embracing Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s Move. Surprised and disappointed, to be exact—I shan’t be participating in this motion control business, that’s for sure.

Right, so Cevat Yerli, the Crytek CEO, said that they’re “working very closely with Sony and Microsoft in regards to motion control on both the PS3 and Xbox 360.” Want more info? Sorry, for “that’s as much as NDA allows [Crytek] to say right now.”

All of this hubbub stems from the recent registration of a name and logo in the UK for something called “Self Defense.” Word on the street, and I have no idea where this street can be found, is that “Self Defense” has to do with motion control.

Mouse and keyboard till I die, etc.



WWE SmackDown moves to SyFy: Remember when they used to have science fiction?

Posted by on Wednesday, 14 April, 2010

Exciting—and confusing—TV news for y’all. For whatever reason, SyFy, once upon a time known as the Sci-Fi Channel, has agreed to air WWE Friday Night SmackDown! beginning in October. SyFy already airs WWE NXT (remember: we are wild and young), but now SmackDown? When did SyFy betray its roots of terrible alien movies and Stephen King movies?

Word on the street is that WWE moved SmackDown to SyFy because the current network, MyNetworkTV, is pretty much dead. It hardly has any original programming of its own anymore, and it doesn’t even subscribe to “regular” ratings services anymore. At this point, My Network TV is right at the level of a mildly popular YouTube channel.

Again, SyFy isn’t new to WWE, having aired ECW in the past. It currently airs NXT, which is a show that showcases new guys. I mean, Bryan Danielson has been around for 10 years, and has wrestled all over the world, and is probably as good a worker as you’ll find in the company these days, but whatever.

I guess the question I pose to you is: where does SyFy fit in your life these days? I’m going to assume that, as tech fans, you’re relatively cool with science fiction. Does SyFy still appeal to you? Or are you too busy fiddling with your iPad or PS3 to give a damn about cable TV these days?

Or maybe SyFy is just one channel out of 600 that you never bother to watch?

I don’t know why they’re keeping SmackDown on Friday nights—don’t most normal people go out on Friday nights? Or is WWE of the mentality that, “Well, our target audience these days is kids, and they’re not going out and getting hammered once they get out of school on Fridays.”