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Dear Industry Executive
Paul Skeldon | |||||||||||
3GSM: Mobile video — all the rage, but are users ready for it?One
of the hottest topics at 3GSM this year is Mobile TV, with countless
companies showing what it can do, how to make it work and how to make
money from it. But a survey of 22,000 European mobile users
commissioned by Tellabs reveals that a high percentage of early
adopters of mobile TV and video services are snubbing a second
helping. The research, conducted by M:Metrics in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France and Spain, brought up an interesting issue: on average, former users of mobile TV and video outnumber current users by more than 19 per cent. Users cited price, quality and reliability issues as the main reasons why they do not come back for more. Forty-five per cent of European mobile video and TV users cited pricing issues as a factor causing them to switch off the services. And nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of users who tried mobile video and TV stopped using the services due to concerns about service quality and reliability. Despite this, launches of mobile TV services are everywhere at 3GSM. At 12.00 noon local time on Monday, CNN broadcast its first 3G news report, showcasing its new CNN mobile service, first mooted last week in ContentFutures. More popular is mobile video streaming services, which are also abundant at 3GSM. Many platform providers are on hand launching mobile media platforms for all contetnt, but many are concentrating their marketing efforts at least on showing what can be done with video, vis a vis Echovox’s Zong platform. Read More: http://www.tellabs.com/news/2007/nr021207.shtml | |||||||||||
3GSM: Search — not as popular as everyone likes to think?While the mobile industry is
labouring under the impression that 89 per cent of mobile internet
users regularly find stuff through search, a study by the Mobile
Entertainment Forum published at the show, indicates that just 20 per
cent actually do. However, those that do tend to buy more premium
content than those that don’t. Read More: http://www.mobile-ent.biz/New-mobile-ad-play-from-Openwave-and-Jumptap | |||||||||||
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3GSM: Ad funded content — is mobile the marketeer’s preferred channel?While advertising around search is becoming a key issue in content discovery, 3GSM in Barcelona is all abuzz with talk of the mobile channel increasingly becoming the digital channel of choice for marketers: it is personal, direct and immediate.On the back of this much is being launched around the mobile advertising space, both the fund content services and to target the marketing world. Timo T. Laaksonen, Chief Executive Officer of First Hop, tells me that: “Advertising and mobile will finally meet in 2007. The First Hop Mobile Advertising Solution [being launched at 3GSM] allows the operator to quickly ad-enable its whole service delivery platform. Mobile has the potential to become the preferred digital marketing channel with promotion and advertising being targeted at a single user level. Mobile operators that deploy the solution will be able to generate significant new revenue streams by being in a position to attract big brands and external advertisers.” The solution allows operators to offer mobile advertising, ad-funded services, or branded and sponsored content using person to person messaging, multimedia broadcast, and browsing services. The solution also enables the operator to develop new subscription models such as ad-funded content services. Mobile operators will be able to roll out a service model which offers users free content or free text or minutes in exchange for receiving advertisements. Read More: http://www.firsthop.com/press/13022007.html | |||||||||||
3GSM: Location, location, location — bringing it all together?Finding a late night bar to carry on the indepth interviews here in at 3GSM has never been simpler, thanks in the main to the host of location-based services that are being demo-ed at the show.Long vaunted location-based services — especially mapping, but not restricted simply to that — are coming of age. The technology is there to do it, as ably demonstrated by numerous companies. Now consumers seem to be switching on to the idea too. In particular the tie-up between location, search and advertising — which ties up most of this show’s key themes — is very prominent. While I have been using it to find late night eats and drinks, many others see my location as an ideal way to push special offers to me and even content relating to where I am. Outside of the press corps I may be alone, ‘normal’ users seem to prefer movies to margaritas, according to local-search specialist M-Spatial, which has an index of what people look for. Pushing branding, advertising, coupons and more to phones, however, as you near or pass a shop seems to be the real killer application right now. Look out for it on a high street near you. Read More: http://www.m-spatial.com/news_and_events/news/local_view | |||||||||||
3GSM: Music — giving Apple a run for its money?Music services for mobile have long been overshadowed by iTunes and the launch of the long-awaited iPhone last month seemed to cement Apple’s place as the leader in digital music; a position that could see mobile music fail to reach any sizeable market share.That was until Omnifone, a UK-based mobile music company, this week announced a collaboration with Musiwave, an Openwave company, the leading provider of mobile music entertainment services to operators and media companies worldwide, to distribute MusicStation, a revolutionary ‘all-you-can-eat’ mobile music service, that works on all major music handsets. For a fee of only £1.99 per week MusicStation provides subscribers with unlimited localised Over the Air (OTA) downloads to their mobiles from Musiwave’s end-to-end music platform. This shakes things up a bit. Now over the air downloads are a reality (network operator data pricing permitting) this relatively cheap all you can eat model could be the key to challenging iTune’s stranglehold on the market as well as promoting the mobile channel as a music consumer’s paradise. All that needs to happen now is for someone to sort out the DRM… Read More: http://www.omnifone.com/news_detail_musicstation_launch.htm
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3GSM: But is it all just too overwhelming and complicated for the users?While 3GSM is pitching some of the coolest mobile content and services offerings to come in the next 12 months, many of the boffins behind such services may be forgetting one important factor: the users. As an important reality check, two separate studies are doing the rounds here in Barcelona on how users are finding it increasingly overwhelming trying to figure out how to use their handsets and the services they connect to, much to the detriment of the industry.Service management company Olista, has found that up to 55 per cent of potential 3G users abandon VAS due to basic usability issues such as difficulty navigating through menus, inability to find downloaded content, or a forgotten password. The findings came from live trials conducted by Olista and European mobile operators to identify the common barriers to potential 3G portal and content users. Further statistics showed that users are confused between streaming and download, an issue further hampered by the bad billing experiences affecting 10 to 25 per cent of users who receive multiple downloads of the same content. This makes disappointing reading and shows the gap between the number of customers who could use VAS and the number who actively do is huge. Function fatigue is how the CMO Council puts it in its Global Mobile Mindset Audit, a milestone study of some 15,000 consumers in 37 countries, showing that “too many functions I did not use” is the number one device problem in all regions of the world. Compounding this complaint were disappointments in the early buying and ongoing ownership experience. Most notably, consumers gave low marks to retailers and carriers for lack of product demonstrations, sales associate knowledge, as well as slow service at point-of-sale. One answer has been the on device portal (ODP), popularized by SurfKitchen and Orange, which claim the companies, has seen a doubling in content downloads since the ‘Orange Downloads’ ODP service was launched last year. Read More: http://www.fameforusers.org/news/pr.html#021207 | |||||||||||
Upcoming Events | |||||||||||
IRR, 19th-22nd February 2007, IIR's
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