MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES: the content provider perspective

What is mobile content?

• The report focuses specifically upon areas where there is a commercial opportunity in providing content to mobile devices.
• As well as paid-for content accessed via mobile phones, this includes:
• content for PDAs, accessed directly via a wireless connection or uploaded from a PC;
• the role of mobile content in supporting other channels;
• the voice content industry.
• It does not include:
• person-to-person messaging;
• mobile marketing;
• public information services.

The mobile industry

• Two factors underlie the industry?s problems:
• The uncritical commitment to WAP and the inevitable user disappointment that followed;
• The prices paid in the European 3G spectrum auctions.
• It also remains unclear whether i-mode will be able to reproduce its dramatic success in Japan in new launches in Europe and the US.

Penetration and predictions

• The latest statistics on mobile content.

Content applications

• There are two schools of thought about the type of content that will work in a mobile environment:
• services that are specifically useful to those on the move;
• entertainment services for people with a few minutes to fill (e.g. people in transit).
• The key content arenas for mobile devices will be games, location-based services, mobile music, sports content and adult content.
• Business applications are likely to remain the province of large-scale enterprise applications for the foreseeable future.
• SMS-based services have proved the biggest commercial success, because there is a huge potential user-base and a channel for collecting revenue easily.
• Downloads of ringtones and logos have proved another consistent source of revenue.
• AvantGo?s content downloaded to PDAs from PCs has seen success in the corporate market and attracted the interest of information publishers.

Revenue and payment models

• No current revenue model is proven: all are experimental.
• Some content owners regard mobile content as an essential part of a multi-channel strategy, and do not expect users to pay for it.
• Advertising is not working in other online contexts and the wireless medium is not itself advertising-friendly.
• Reverse billing for single purchase of SMS content is just creeping into the market.
• Taking a cut of sales passed to an online merchant remains an unreliable revenue stream with the current small number of users.
• Many SMS services successfully charge on a subscription basis.

Standards for mobile content applications

• Wireless standards are currently messy.
• Among those considered here are WAP, WML, HTML, XHTML, Voice XML, Microsoft Smartphone 2002, Symbian?s Epoc, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, 802.11 and location systems.

Wireless standards and content providers

• What do content owners have to do to their content to make it ready for delivery via these standards?
• Which tech/hardware platform(s) will provide content providers with the best short-term opportunities and why?
• Which standards?

The Future

• The delays in the launch of 3G and plateauing in the number of wireless subscribers suggest that there is currently limited room for growth. However in the early 1990s many held the outlook for GSM to be equally difficult.
• A successful GPRS market would increase the opportunities for content developers. However, operators remain unclear about the future of their 3G investment, and would not want to see its success challenged by 2.5G applications that met the needs of the majority of users.