Annoying Mobile Partnerships

Why is it that companies make these ‘exclusive’ deals with other companies to offer stuff that all their customers would want.

Case in point is Tivo’s latest ‘partnership’ with Verizon to offer Tivo Mobile which lets you browse and schedule Tivo recordings via your cellphone - in this case only if you have a Verizon phone. As if I’m going to switch to Verizon just to schedule my Tivo. I’d love to be able to use an app like this on my Treo but I can’t. What kind of market research did Tivo do to decide that they would only offer this service to Verizon customers.

Another example is the Vancouver Canucks offering a number of mobile services but only to Telus customers. Why wouldn’t you offer those services to all your fans and not just the Telus ones? In this case I suspect it was Telus that had the infrastructure and offered it to the Canucks. Fortunately starting next season they will be offering these services to all carriers.

It doesn’t matter anyways…paying to download a crummy wallpaper of the Canucks logo for your phone is silly anyways…those that want it can probably figure out how to use google images, photoshop and bluetooth to send their own stuff to the phone…okay, so maybe just a geek.

Thursday, March 29th, 2007 : Mobile : No Comments

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.