I am continuing to have discussions about what I think the future of pricing is like in age of the Freemium.

When you look at IP mulitmedia services and the battle between the status quo and the over-the-top models, I keep trying to get my arms around this issue: At what point does the bundle compete well with free?

Of course, the ideal answer is that free is supplemented by advertising and solutions that make SEO and demographic data make big brother into a circus barker.

However, I am not sure that model endures, particularly as the sophistication takes the granularity down to levels where customer privacy starts to become a concern.

So I look for sophisticated answers

The use of Gmail as an Enterprise application is one case in point. Several of my employers have been using Gmail as a corporate email system for free.

However the folks at Google (News - Alert) also offer the service very cheaply to government and enterprise accounts.

For Google these partitions are incremental and the economies of Google providing the service over the enterprise team is apparent from the expertise level as well.

Microsoft (News - Alert) I should point out is also willing to provide these services.

Using these services eliminates a burden on the staff that often has nothing but potential problems for Enterprise.

The question is when does free change to fee?

And why would you do this?

I ask this in this forum, because I think it relates to what will happen with Video Calls as well.

Free will be the norm for point to point and many to many on an internal system. 

Interconnect will be where fee issues will arise and the question is at what point will the costs be justified to charge?

The answer like email may come from the ease of management and economies of scale.

I expect that Video solutions from carriers and telepresence systems will start to interconnect in meet point models that do not share revenue.

I expect that solutions that cannot interoperate may stay in the cost per call model that will isolate them from the real growth.

With services like Hulu, YouTube (News - Alert) and the other over the top video solutions, its hard to imagine pricing video above voice.

IP Multimedia calls may not be free, but I expect they will start to look cheaper than traditional voice calls in the near future.

What do you think?