Regional production director for Yahoo South Asia, Alan Jones, said the company had established a number or relationships with ISPs in the region, and was already in close discussion with broadband providers such as Telstra and Ozemail.
-Our intention is to stay on top of the local market and actively review such opportunities with the local players," Jones said. -It is fair to say that we are always looking for opportunities and a DSL service would be one of the things we are discussing."
The agreement between Yahoo and SBC, inked last November, was heavily touted by the Web portal as a significant step in diversifying revenue. Although the specifics of the deal were not disclosed, Yahoo said it would gain a percentage of access revenue and offer a cut of advertising to SBC for all advertisements sold on the service.
Yahoo executives in the US said the product would package a handful of paid "premium" services to subscribers. According to Jones Yahoo has already rolled out similar value added products through partnerships in the South Asia region including Yahoo branded broadband products in Japan.
-In regards to the Australian market we need to see an increase in broadband penetration from its current level, and some reduction in wholesale pricing on broadband to make the deal worthwhile," Jones said.
News.com's Jim Hu contributed to this report.
After the costs of Broadband, and the throttling down to 28.8Kb/s or excess data charges after 3Gb of data, they want people to cough up even more for a premium service. Hang on there. The service we are paying for for basic pseudo Broadband is a premium price already! Yahoo need to go elsewhere in the world to sell this as their product will not sell in the current Australian environment.
A bad investment environment exists in Australia for the online multimedia content industry.