Summary
How can content be leveraged by the Mobile Operators?
Analysis
I share some of the thoughts in the previous analyses, however one should also look at the content distribution on mobile from a different point of view. More specifically, can we say, as of end of 2006, that content of ANY type has proved to be a golden opportunity for Mobile Service Providers?
If one disregards ring tones (and I would not qualify them as content) we can see that very little impact has been made by content delivery on mobile. True, we have statistics showing some operator successful delivery of television channels but this, by far, has been a bundled service. True, there are statistics on the millions of songs downloaded worldwide, but that fades away as soon as you compare the absolute revenues numbers.
The true story is that the present market has not shown big interest in content via mobile. And the future is going to be worse. As more and more storage capacity is available on cell phones people will become more and more interested in uploading content on their cell phones by synchronizing with the PC and less and less motivated in downloading pricey content from the network. DVB-H is another channel of content distribution undercutting the mobile Operators...
Alternative ways for delivering content and being able to get a share of revenues have to be explores. Besides isn't it true that in today content delivery the mobile operator is getting only a slice (and a small one) of the revenues?
