mBlox and New Vision's D2C

mBlox and New Visions have launched an off portal music download service with a single fee for downloads.

From the press release:

"mBlox, the world's largest mobile transaction network, and New-Visions, a mobile specialist focused on providing marketing solutions to the entertainment industry, are launching the first off-portal music track download services where consumers pay 'one price' to download music with no additional operator data charges.

The operators' data charges for downloading content are often cited as the reason for the slow uptake of rich media services on mobile. Currently consumers are not only paying for the value of the content via premium billing but also for the cost of the data traffic to deliver the content. Consequently, songs that are approximately 1MB in size can cost consumers the GBP 1.50 charge for the song plus an additional GBP 8 in data charges (data charges may vary). These extra charges make the cost of downloading to mobile unacceptably high and can put consumers off downloading music or other media content."