Rav Casley Gera

You know in Star Trek, when Picard orders up a record, piece of data or video by speaking to the computer? Imagine if the computer replied, ‘this media is brought to you by Toyota Galactic’…

The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites for services or content - is hard to make work. New services are cautious about introducing advertising for fear of annoying users. With more and more audio and video content on the web, sites have experimented with adding audio and video adverts, with mixed success. But when speech becomes the main method of interaction with computers - a switch which, thanks to vast improvements in speech recognition technology, is finally looking likely - it’ll become effectively impossible for advertising to provide the main income stream for content and service providers.

Which presents a problem - because paid services have an equally mixed history. Monthly-subscription models at news sites like the Wall Street Journal have seen low take-up, prompting Rupert Murdoch to consider dropping the pay wall last year. The New York Times’ pay model, TimesSelect, was dropped around the same time. Similarly, music subscription services like Napster - though I may like them - haven’t caught on in considerable numbers.

So what to do? The answer may lie in low charges and micro-payment systems. Expecting people to pay £2 an article or £20 a month for access is never going to become a mass-market proposition. But if every page-view, video-view, or listen to a piece of music on a website cost the user a couple of pennies, you could see solid revenue generation at a price that didn’t put users off.

The trick, of course, is the technology. The hassle of putting in credit card details is at least as much of a barrier to pay-per-article services as the cost. What’s needed is a single micro-payment system which sites could join. Once logged in, a user could surf a range of member sites - from newspapers to youtube to music providers - automatically being charged pennies for each page or piece of content consumed. A gauge in the corner of the screen would keep them abreast of charges. Once a month, the user would get a email bill for their total that month, and pay online or via automatic payment.

A system such as this is the only way smooth content delivery, without a point-and-click interface, can be funded. And in comparison to the advertising model, it could provide a far better revenue stream for content providers - necessary in areas like music and news where content creation is expensive. It’s also democratising - instead of a ghettoising division between free and paying customers, you get a natural spread of high- and low-demand users paying different amounts each month. In the long run, you could even adopt the same system for actual data charges.

The central obstacle is the lack of a simple system for in-the-background micro-charging with a monthly bill. What’s needed is someone to do it: ideally a globally-used payment service with a reputation for honesty and money for investment, which many websites already support and many users are already registered with. Now who could that be?