Wavee, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd.’s (Singtel)
communication app, is the latest entry into the crowded OTT market. Described
as an integrated next-generation service that will allow users to make
high-quality voice and video calls.
What does that mean to the rest of the IM/Calling/Social
Chatting apps out there?
Not much apparently, with little visibility apart from the
couple of newspaper articles written about them. Many critics also insisting
that there is little reason for them to migrate from their existing platforms
to Wavee, and that Wavee has nothing unique about it that will draw users away from
incumbents.
But that could exactly be the point.
Singapore is a small market, with a population of 5.47
million, and capturing any portion of this small population isn’t going to
create waves in the industry. But delve deeper into the figures, and you’ll
realise that a sizeable portion of that population, 1.6 million, arise from non-residents.
Foreigners, ranging from employment pass holders to foreign domestic workers and
you may begin to get a glimpse of SingTel’s greater plan.
Sure Wavee has what WhatsApp, Line, Skype, WeChat has. But
do all those apps on their own have what Wavee has? Probably Line and WeChat
come the closest, but they do lose out on certain features. The ability to
attach documents to chats (WeChat), and sketches (Line) are some of the
features lacking.
Perhaps the real market for Wavee, will be the one that is synonymous
with fast growth and a tech-savvy market. Members of our non-resident populace,
who arrive from the developing nations in the region.
Wavee is waiving data charges (till 9th July
2015), while providing free app-to-app Video calls. You can be sure that there
will be a ton of these price-sensitive users downloading the app. The next
thing that Wavee does is to provide high quality calls and video calls. This
aspect of the OTT market has largely been out of the hands of the developer as
data connections and the like are in the hands of the Telcos.
But wait, Wavee is developed by a Telco, and a nation-wide
top tier Telco nonetheless. If Wavee can uphold its promise of higher quality
calls, it would have seeded a precedence in this space. Future and current
developers will have to update their codecs and be able to compress their data
packets further, in order to emulate the quality that Wavee can potentially
provide.
Wavee’s next patch also encompasses the ability for Wavee
users to dial in to landlines and mobile phone numbers, which will be a huge
deal for these developing overseas markets who may not have access to a very
good data connection.
Lastly let us not forget that Telco revenues have been
cannibalized by OTT players for a long time now, and Telcos have been playing
off the back foot for years. This test by SingTel will be the first of its
kind, and may be the business model that many other Telcos are eyeing to take
off.
This is essentially a feasibility test, and where else but Uniquely
Singapore can you find a small controlled population with access to developing
markets to test such a high risk product offering.
And when Wavee does take off, it will already have markets
favourable to Wavee, thanks to seeding plans done today in Singapore.
