Warrington, UK, – ‘Tis the season of giving and BSkyB is using MPP’s iPay technology to offer a ‘gifting’ facility within its new music streaming and download service, Sky Songs. Current Sky customers can choose to gift a subscription of either 1, 3, 6 or 12 months, which then permits the recipient to download an album (or 10 tracks) each month for free.
The gift uses a promotional code, which links to the Sky Songs website and uses MPP’s ewallet to protect the privacy of the credit card details used to pay for the subscription. Once a customer of Sky Songs, subscribers can then also create compilations, playlists, listen to radio stations and access exclusive content. All subscriptions provide customers with unlimited streaming and the ability to listen to over 3 million tracks whenever they want.
MPP’s iPay powers the online billing systems behind the comprehensive range of Sky’s online services. It includes a suite of Account Manager pages, which enable customers to register payment details, self-manage subscriptions and review their order history. It also enables recurring monthly subscriptions and a-la-carte payments via a post-pay model, so that customers can navigate the site and simply purchase music as they go. iPay also rolls multiple payments into a single transaction against pre-stored credit card details.
The gifting facility required changes in a number of areas, including subscription creation, offers table and voucher usage and required regression testing by all parties. Importantly, there were no requirements from Sky Songs to change the user interface of SkyPayments.
“It’s important for us that the online payments and packaging services provided by MPP were seamlessly integrated within Sky Songs,” said Neil Martin, Business Development Director of BSkyB. “Customers who have signed up to Sky Player and other Sky.com services do not need to re-register for Sky Songs, which makes it easy for them to subscribe.”
Paul Johnson, MPP’s CEO, commented: “We developed iPay to support Sky across a broad range of online services. It is gratifying that our macro-, micro- and recurring-payment platform continues to enable Sky to launch new online services quickly, and with the minimum of fuss.”
Sky recently applied iPay to sell subscriptions to Sky’s iPhone app, Sky Packages and Sky Freesat cards online and iPay also continues to power Sky’s live and on demand TV service Sky Player.
For further information, please contact: Philip Joy at MPP Global Solutions 0844 873 1418 or philip.joy@mppglobal.com
