Your Vodafone smartphone plan can already be bundled with music streaming from Spotify, but there’s another media soon to be available on your telco bill. Although they won’t say what the actual deal entails, Voda is partnering with video streaming service Stan.
Another partnership along the lines of Vodafone’s deal with Spotify, the Stan deal will not mean that customers will have unlimited and quota-free access to the service. Vodafone Australia CEO Inaki Berroeta says the partnership will be similar to Spotify’s; this likely means it will be bundled value with the company’s higher-cost Red plans — “it is something that we are considering for most of our customers, for the whole base. It will be a similar type of deal.”
Mike Sneesby from Stan says the agreement is a natural one — “From the start, we saw a very clear strategy from Vodafone. We kicked off discussions before we even launched; it was very obvious for us.” Stan has enjoyed a sharp boost in subscriber numbers since it launched, with heavy advertising giving it a head start over potential rivals like Netflix, although all users are still within their 30-day free trial period.
Stan is a video streaming service, and as such it can chew through a large amount of bandwidth in a short time; on the face of it it’s not a great idea on a mobile data network or on a smartphone. Vodafone’s Steve Smyth isn’t worried about Stan affecting users’ data usage adversely, though, saying “the baseline amount of data is sufficient for the average user… our data work-out will let customers work out how much they need.”
There is no actual detail about the partnership, though; Vodafone says it “will announce full details of the Stan offer in the coming weeks.” So there’s that.