more about charging for content - incl 'consolidation' concept

Follow this link for an excellent article by Wired on the charging issue:

http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,42694,00.html

It includes figures on what various research studies have revealed customers would be willing to pay - and for what.

It also talks about the concept of 'consolidation'. Ryan Jones, an analyst with the Yankee Group, states in the article:

"People are not going to be excited to pay $4.95 here and $18.95 there. I think in the future you would pay one bill for music downloads, video, news and everything else due to consolidation. I think you're going to see a lot of consolidation across the board."

That's an interesting idea - you pay a fixed monthly fee, which gives you X, Y and Z from A, B & C providers. It does rely on each of those providers being brought together in some sort of alliance and everyone being able to agree on who gets what % of the monthly fee - let alone having the technical systems to automate all that splitting of revenue. I think it's quite difficult to imagine individual companies having the common sense and reason to organise it all themselves, so perhaps it will be the big portal sites (eg ISPs like Freeserve) or someone like Real in a broadband environment who will bash the necessary heads together. But it still ignores the issue of "well, I can get it for free elsewhere", so we come right back to the concept of needing to have content that is so damn sexy (ie. premium must-have stuff). I think cherry-picking of individual providers' content will be obligatory for any organisation seeking to aggregate, distribute and charge for a 'consolidated' package of content.

This consolidation idea is also far away, though, from the whole basis of micropayments. I'm not sure that I agree with Ryan Jones' assertion. Personally, I'd have no issue paying 35p here, £2.00 there for content or services that I thought useful. After all, we're used to micropayments/microbilling on our phones - esp mobiles. If the payment systems were in place that made that easy to manage (probably involving an account, which you settle at the end of each month, as with your mobile), I'd be perfectly happy with it.

So what do you think? Would you be willing to pay for incremental pieces of content, leading to monthly 'account' settling?

Sam