Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Premium Price’

Warner Bros to axe licenses for free streaming services

After a rough quarter which suggested that the variable-track pricing record labels fought so hard for was hurting digital sales, Warner Music Group has announced that it will no longer be licensing its music to services that offer free streaming. Warner hasn’t specifically spelled out if that will apply to current deals with services like Last.fm, Spotify, and Pandora, or just to future deals, but it could put a damper on them if artists like REM, Death Cab for Cutie, and T-Pain were no longer available on those services.

“Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed,” Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. told BBC News. “The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

Read the whole story…

EA to lay off 1500 workers, close some facilities

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Large-scale layoffs have been hitting everywhere in the past year, and Electronic Arts is now no different: according to Gamasutra, the game publisher announced today that it will lay off 1,500 workers by April 2010, after posting a year-to-year decrease in revenue and a net loss of $391 million.

About 1,300 of the freshly unemployed individuals will result from the full closure of some of EA’s facilities. This will cost EA money at the outset, but they estimate that by dropping the facilities they stand to save about $100 million annually. According to EA CEO John Riccitello, the cuts are happening in “targeted areas,” so the company can focus up on its bigger, more lucrative games.

EA has kept up well with the iPhone platform and has released some of its most popular titles to the App Store, such as The Sims 3, Rock Band, and Spore. Consumers still pay a premium price for them, however. For example, Rock Band costs $9.99 and comes with only 20 songs, and charges 50 cents for each additional song. Still, Rock Band ended up selling well, so maybe we’ll be seeing more of EA in the App Store in the coming fiscal quarters.

EA also announced today its acquisition of Playfish, whose primary business is Facebook games, for $300 million. Hopefully out of the layoff ashes rises some brutally addictive social-based game for the iPhone.

TUAWEA to lay off 1500 workers, close some facilities originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Wolfram Alpha’s $50 iPhone App: Too Expensive or Worth the Extra Money for the Premium Experience?

When Wolfram Research released its iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha earlier this week, most of the attention quickly shifted away from the features of the app itself and towards the high price of the app. At $49.99, Wolfram Alpha is far more expensive than most apps in the App Store today, where only a small number of highly specialized apps sell for more than $9.99. Today, we got a chance to discuss Wolfram’s pricing strategy with Schoeller Porter, the product manager for Wolfram Alpha’s iPhone app.

Sponsor

Early Reactions

On Twitter and in the tech blogosphere, the reactions to the app’s price were anything but subtle. We called it “too expensive” ourselves, though others had stronger words for it. MIT’s Technology Review called it a “a pricey online calculator for geeks” – a product that’s more like the expensive but immensely powerful Mathematica than Stephen Wolfram’s original idea for Alpha (”Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people”).

It is worth noting that the Wolfram Alpha app quickly appeared in the list of top 100 grossing apps in the iTunes App Store (iTunes link) and has been hovering at the lower end of the top 50 ever since. That doesn’t make it a breakout hit, but some people are clearly buying the app, even though only a small number of users have left reviews.

A Premium Price for a Premium Experience

There can be little doubt that the Wolfram Alpha team was expecting some backlash. As Porter told us today, the Wolfram Alpha team decided to price the app with the cost of a hardware graphing calculator in mind. At $50, the app costs roughly half of what a hardware calculator would cost. As Porter also stressed, the app offers a far superior range of features thanks to its connection to Wolfram’s server farm. The company thinks this price is justified because of the superior experience of using the app over the mobile website.

After using the app for a few days, we definitely have to agree there. The dual-keyboard solution makes entering queries in the app much easier than using the mobile site and accessing Wolfram Alpha from the app is also much faster then using the mobile site.

Porter noted that Wolfram is trying to set itself off from the mass of $0.99 apps that only get used once and are quickly forgotten. Instead, the company hopes that the app will become a regular companion for its users, whether they are using it for help with their homework in school or college, or in their professional life.

At the end of the day, this is an app for specialists. While Schoeller Porter worded this more carefully in our interview today, the basic fact is that Wolfram is charging a premium price for a premium experience. Users who don’t need the app can continue to use the website, while those who are willing and able to spend $50 on the app will get a superior experience. For the time being, Wolfram doesn’t expect to bring the price of the app down and so far, according to Porter, the team has been happy and excited about how the app has been performing in the marketplace.

The Price of iPhone Apps

This also leads into a broader discussion about the current pricing in the iPhone App Store, where even the most complex apps and games have to sell for under $10 to reach a wide audience. At the end of our discussion, Porter noted that the Wolfram app may lead to some changes here, though we have to wonder if anything is likely to change the current drift towards lower prices in the App Store.

It is also worth pointing out, though, that a lower price point opens up the market for an app to a far wider audience – often to the point where the lower price brings in exponentially more users and more than offsets any potential losses from the lower price.

What Do You Think?

Is Wolfram’s price point for the iPhone app a bold move? Hubris? Or would you be happy to pay $50 for the superior experience and ergonomics of the app?

Discuss

Read the whole story…

CNN: Our iPhone app is "not a hobby"

Filed under: Multimedia, Software, iPhone, App Store

CNN chatted with our good friends at DLS about the news network’s iPhone app (scheduled to hit an App Store near you very soon), and it actually sounds pretty premium: in-app video, breaking news live video streaming, a Coverflow-style way to browse news information, the ability to store news to read later, and social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, and the usual suspects. CNN even says they want to add more to the app in the future, including some iReport-style news delivery functions, so people with iPhones out in the world can send news in as quickly as possible.

Ok, CNN, we get it — you care about this one. It does sound like they’re making a major push in terms of making their content interactive on the iPhone, but on the other hand, maybe they’re just trying to sell you on the “premium” price: $1.99, with (we’re told) non-intrusive advertising included. Obviously, $2 is cheap, but on the other hand, especially with advertising both from the network itself and outside clients, the crankiest of App Store browsers will probably flinch at it a little bit. If you are interested, however, CNN would love to take your money: their app should be available in the App Store as soon as Apple lets it through.

TUAWCNN: Our iPhone app is “not a hobby” originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…