Mobile world insights

Mobile games: Though growing overall, are declining in importance among network operators. Currently, 90% of mobile game downloads happen on-portal, but this is likely to decrease as the operators lose interest and the emergence of flat-rate data plans encourages more off-portal browsing and downloads.

Music: Right now, it’s music that the operators are most interested in, and this is where they are spending their money. In Japan, 90% of digital music revenues are mobile. In 2005, Nokia and Sony Ericsson sold twice as many “music phones” as Apple did iPods. In 2006 it was triple, and in 2007, quadruple.

Mobile TV: While Unicast TV services (delivered over a mobile network) still generate more revenues that broadcast TV services, (€210m versus €150m), broadcast is catching up. In terms of viewers, broadcast accounts for 26 million, Unicast just 6 million, principally because Unicast services do not offer a great experience.

Mobile Media Advertising: Screen Digest is predicting that this will be worth €1.8 billion by 2012, more than 85% of which will be accounted for by Mobile TV. To put this in perspective, however, Screen Digest's forecast for the size of the total UK online advertising marketplace in 2012, at €6.2 billion. Even in 2012, mobile advertising will still be a nascent sector.

Mobile Operators: Will they eventually go the same way as ISPs and become a dump pipe? Screen Digest is not convinced this will happen because mobile network operators hold a number of advantages over ISPs. First, they have a wealth of data on their users, and they also have their own private networks. Both of these facilitate their role in the mobile advertising value chain, though they face competition from some big players with deep pockets, in the form of Nokia, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

source: Screen Digest