Monday October 20, 2008 - Antonette Goroch
As mobile carriers compete for bigger and better content offerings, is it the big companies or the consumers who benefit in the end?
With some 3 billion worldwide users, the mobile content delivery platform is coveted territory. To date, service providers have been strict gatekeepers with their subscribers, reaping the huge profits from an array of ringtones, screen savers and games. The next frontier, of course, is video content, and already there are a growing variety of mobisodes, TV episodes and even movies available from virtually all carriers. With the advent of mobile broadband the next frontier could be far more complicated.
The idea of “over the top” content delivery (bypassing the service provider network) has been simmering in the world of pay TV for some time, as operators seek to balance the advantage of offering broadband data services with the possibility that users could begin to use that connection to get content competitive to regular pay TV packages. Mobile operators are now doing a similar balancing act, seeking to make use of 3G and 4G network infrastructures for attractive mobile broadband access while trying to make the most out of direct content sales. Some providers, such as Sprint, have embraced the idea of “open access”, using the availability of third party Internet content as a selling point, while others, such as Verizon, have limited access to mobile broadband and seek to beef up their own walled garden of content.
The momentum is unmistakable, though. Mobile broadband users grew from just 11 million last year to more than 50 million in 2008 and are growing at about 4 million users per month, according to the mobile industry trade group, the GSM Association. Regardless of how operators choose to slice the pie, DTC believes that the big winners in this equation will be consumers, who will have access to far more content than any walled garden could ever provide.
