bevter,
I'll try a very short version for clarity, and yes, recent news has made it all quite confusing. I'm only skim reading news and posts of late due to other commitments. But this is what I understand so far.
Firstly, a quick breakdown of the goods. Two products: Freeway & Dataflex. The CSP is the actual program that drives both. The apps differ in their intention. FW hosts sponsored apps (by content providers) for the public, although this can be within a telcos customer domain; more on that later. Dataflex is for employees/employers, to divide personal smartphones business from private use when operated in the workplace (BYOD). It does this by having the employer selected apps chosen for your phone for work purposes. Any other apps you use fall under your own costs.
Regarding AT&T, we are not exactly sure of the precise operating arrangements. The recent extension of the initial relationship, in conjunction with AT's move into the entertainment industry, with intentions of offering it on mobile devices, seems to indicate that SYT is firmly rooted somewhere in the technical background, possibly more so than just with Freeway. But it hasn't been announced that the CSP is operating the whole new back-end of AT's new entertainment dreams. If it is, I can see them buying Synotonic fairly soon, but that is another story.
I wan't to quote a helpful part from last news: This significant data price reduction now provides the means to offer more than 60M AT&T mobile subscribers a financially viable, over-the-top (“OTT”) mobile audio and video service, either as sponsored or as a paid subscription.
These are AT customers who can have audio and video (say, music and movies), but either sponsored or paid subscription. Now at first, these two offerings seem contradictory, but not so. Firstly, users won't be watching new movies from ex-Warner, for example, for free. They will need a subscription for so many movies /month, probably measured by data. But the data and platform is provided by Syntonic, hence the cheap rate they were given. The music or movie runs through a mobile device using Freeway, and Syn collects on the up-data price from the content providers. We musn't forget that the CSP enables data flow with full analytics for measuring and directing back to a controller, in this case AT&T, just as it does to the employer and employee on Dataflex.
For the sponsored version mentioned above, the system works the same way, but the user isn't using a subscription for movies say, but using content being offered, like a game or news broadcast, which the provider pays Syn for the data consumption (measured by the analytics) and any add on's like CPI and CPA (see prospectus). AT&T, potentially also being the owner of such content, by now owning CNN for example, probably still pay Syn up-data charges, even though they received it from them cheap in the first place. This is because CNN and other content now owned by AT, still operate independently, that is, self sufficiently as a financial going concern.
The extended Verizon deal seems clearer in that they have made a new FreebeeData system to work alongside the original FreebeePerks, which didn't offer data as a reward and has been in operation for several years. FreebeeData on the other hand is solely for data rewards, and Syn is the operator.
The above is just my quickest attempt, and I've probably left plenty out, as I'm almost dead now as 2100 hours is already 2 hours past my true bedtime on my present 'roster'.
I'm sure others can add/subtract/multiply or divide. (But can they spell?)
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