What Will Happen to Mobile Content?
Posted on August 25, 2006
Filed Under Commercial Trends |
Ajit Jaokar is CEO of futuretext, a London based publisher that is documenting the future of mobile so a good person to talk to about where mobile content is headed.
I came to this conversation by way of Steve McCormack who runs Wildwave, a Dublin provider of mobile content to operators worldwide. Steve was pointing out to me that users have gotten over the initial thrill of being able to access sports updates and information that had immediacy. They’re now starting to browse and they browse for information that has longer term value.
Recipes are picking up, for example, and I can see a future for content that has everyday value. Ajit though sees two phases evolving before us.
The first is already unfolding. Services like YouTube and flickr are in part driven by mobile content. Many of the images/videos are captured first on the mobile phone. So while people are not using MMS, they are adopting their own cross-platform strategies and that’s having a substantial impact on upload sites.
Second though, Ajit believes there is existing momentum for a surge in mobile content use, if two conditions are fulfilled.
The first is that content prodivers get over the idea that they can just repackage content. Those TV programmes are not so interesting when you have to pay to consumer them on a small screen.
The second is for mobile operators to come clean with tariffs, provide a fair share to content developers and charge a fixed price to consumers.
“There’s a thing called bill shock,” says Ajit. “People use the mobile for multimedia once and then they see the bill. They are shocked by it and they won’t use it again.”
Time to address bill shock and to originate high class content. In my view Prison Break has shown a way. Prison Break’s mobisodes are related to the hit TV series but different from it, providing another dimension to what you see on TV. A little prosaic in execution, the idea nonetheless carries a lot of fertile possibilities.
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