Mobile Content Going Slow

by tdavis1198 | May 19, 2006 at 08:26 am

1493 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Despite the recent buzz about entertainment on cell phones, the mobile-content market has hit a speed bump.

After an initial burst of growth, mobile content--which can include everything from ring tones to video clips--is struggling to break out of the early adopter segment and achieve mass consumption. It is too soon to forecast the demise of this promising new field, but it is evident that wireless entertainment is wavering during a crucial transition to third-generation mobile telephony, or 3G

In this article Robert Tercek says that the sale of mobile content is slowing due to little or unimaginative carrier marketing, failure to segment the market, boring content and the inability of your average subscriber to find content. I dont think any of this information is a surprise. The big question is, what can be done about it. Two big problems have to be solved, more content that caters to specific demographics and interests needs to be created and the distribution model for both promoting content and accessing content has to change.

But that is where the big dilemma lies, the mobile market is very complex, different phones, different carriers, different countries so to create content is very difficult and expensive. Just think about creating a game or application that has to work (to be really succesfull) on hundreds of devices, all of which are subtely different. And then the content has to be tested and deployed. Companies like Tira Wireless provide technology to solve this problem.

In terms of the distribution, we have to move from a carrier centric approach to a model where content is promoted by communities and networks of end users.

And finally, we have to solve the usability challenge of actually getting the content onto the device and (more importantly) finding the stuff once its on the device!!

Disclaimer (or shameless self promotion): Two Brightspark Ventures companies are squarely focused on solving these problems Tira Wireless (http://www.tirawireless.com) and Cascada Mobile (http://www.cascadamobile.com)