PANKHURST ON DOTCOM LIFE: The time is right to venture into the bright world of iTV

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Steve Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited

December 01, 2003

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PANKHURST ON DOTCOM LIFE: The time is right to venture into the bright world of iTV

In the last few years, as venture-capital money has got harder to come by and paid-for content more common, it has not only been important to decide what can be paid for, but how. As more than a few digital businesses have found, it's hard enough to ask people for money, without making it hard for them to actually pay you.

It is important to not only have something worth charging for, but to make sure users have as many options for paying as possible, which is why we recently added the option of paying our membership fee by direct debit and the BT blue phone bill.

However, our very latest project at Friends Reunited will make paying even easier. Yes, we've taken our first steps into interactive television.

Thanks to Sky Active, a whole bright new world has been opened up to our business. While users of our web site pay a one-off fee to be able to contact anyone any number of times, users of the television service will be charged according to how long they browse and the number of emails they want to send.

I doubt that this will change our business model on the internet, but it could make for some interesting lessons. It has taken us this long to get involved in TV for a very simple reason: we haven't managed to find the time before now as we've developed the web-based business and services so quickly.

Still, the timing now seems to be right. There are currently seven million households out there with Sky and the interface seems to be working pretty well. We have also been able to put our in-house team of developers to work on creating the new service, so it has not been as expensive to implement as it might have done earlier on. Interactive TV services can be pretty clunky, but they have improved. Now, the browsing time is good for us. Viewers will be able to look at their school lists and message boards, and we have fully integrated the service with the web site's database.

Friends Reunited will also be making its appearance on yet another, more traditional, platform for the very first time this month. Although the Friends Reunited book, Friends Reunited.co.uk, is hardly new media, it's a first for us. Written by Andrew Collins, I guess it just proves that the stories which make good content for our web site can go the other way and make for a good book too. And, coming right back to where I started, people are happy to pay for it as well.

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