Everyone agrees that content is king, but it still represents a mere 10 percent of mobile data traffic in the United States. So big carriers are throwing their weight and marketing behind new, exclusive content offerings and personalization, with consumer lifestyle as a rallying cry.
Len Lauer, Sprint Nextel president and COO, laid out his company’s consumer entertainment vision at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2005 show this fall. Describing Sprint as a “communications entertainment” company, Lauer says entertainment’s convergence and collaboration with the wireless delivery mechanism has spawned multiple opportunities for carriers to carve out new territories and value propositions far beyond voice.
 Wireless companies are aiming to become entertainment powerhouses with exclusive content. |
Other industry players agree wireless will become a lifestyle rather than a technology, thanks to music, television and content. “This takes us further toward the future of convergence,” says RealNetworks Inc. Chairman and CEO Rob Glaser, who was among the keynote speakers at the recent CTIA show. “We give the consumer what they want, where and when they want it, across federated networks.”
CTIA is becoming the music industry’s most important conference, says Edgar Bronfman Jr., chairman and CEO at Warner Music Group Inc. “Just ahead of us is the single most important opportunity the music industry has ever had, as the cell phone continues to become a unified device with a profound social, economic and global impact,” he says.
Bronfman — whose company has 150,000 titles digitized for virtual distribution — says the stage is set for a revitalization of a piracy-ravaged recording industry. “Music will play a critical role in driving consumer adoption of nascent technology,” he says. In return, he notes, secure networks controlled by carriers with direct consumer billing relationships, standard, open digital rights management platforms and creative merchandising that leverages mobile’s anywhere-at-anytime potential will serve to create a multibillion-dollar music marketplace in the future.
Warner expects to announce soon a carrier deal that will enable mobile subscribers to download tracks to their handsets over the air and to their PCs, simultaneously.
In other wireless content action, Sprint Nextel last month launched Sprint Music Store, which offers personalized service with a customizable start screen, part of a unique user interface that can be outfitted with backgrounds and icons, much as users can customize handsets with ringtones. Users can provision full music downloads over the air. The service operates on Sprint’s EVDO (evolution data optimized) network and employs AAC audio compression technology. Sprint also will offer exclusive NFL content for $6 per month; NFL highlights will be pushed to subscribers’ handsets at regular intervals along with the top 10 plays of the game as a wrap-up, Lauer says.
Not to be outdone, Cingular Wireless garnered an exclusive for the first month of Billboard Mobile’s service launch this fall. Tightly integrated with Billboard.com, Billboard Mobile offers features like personalized content delivery, music/artist news, album reviews, tour/concert dates and ticket information. It also includes a full image gallery, music samples and custom music-related mini games and music trivia. Users can request a weekly short messaging service alert with a listing of the Top 5 songs of the week, with links to buy the ringtone for each. Ringtones are searchable by artist, genre, song or album name, or users can select songs directly from Billboard’s charts.
Jim Ryan, vice president of consumer data services for Cingular, says he is “thrilled” the operator was able to offer a preview of the service.
Beyond music, wireless operators are embracing television, the true entertainment medium of the masses. At CTIA, Cingular announced it will roll out mobile TV, using RealNetworks’ Helix OnlineTV platform to support 3G video offerings. The ASP-delivered enablement platform covers content provider management, integrates with carrier OSS and billing systems, allows seamless shifting between 2.5G and 3G environments, and enables carrier hosting and the delivery of streaming media.
And according to Reuters, Zachary Research analyst Patrick Comack spilled the news that Verizon Wireless plans to offer live TV broadcasts in the top 30 U.S. markets via a network built by tower operator Crown Castle International Corp. beginning in 2006. The network will be dedicated to mobile TV, allowing Verizon to maximize capacity and offload the burden from its existing network.
And to offload the burden of cutting differentiating deals with hot content providers, AG Interactive, a subsidiary of American Greetings, has designed prepackaged content bundles for operators. At CTIA, AG announced a multiyear exclusive partnership with Sports Illustrated to develop and distribute premium content. It also is expanding its relationship with Def Jam Enterprises to launch Def Connect, a hip-hop mobile video offering with six channels of mobile-specific content.
AG Interactive creates a turnkey content package and distributes it via carriers and MVNOs like Amp’d Mobile. Bryan Biniak, senior vice president and general manager of wireless services for AG Interactive, likens the approach to a “data-only MVNO.”
“Carriers and operators are focused on gaining new customers, retaining them, and then increasing ARPU,” he says. “We bring a targeted set of content offerings to them, and also a business solution.”
| Links |
| AG Interactive www.interactive.ag.com Amp'd Mobile www.ampdmobile.com Billboard www.billboard.com Cingular Wireless www.cingular.com Crown Castle International Corp. www.crowncastle.com CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2005 www.ctia.org RealNetworks Inc. www.realnetworks.com Sprint-Nextel www.sprint.com Verizon Wireless www.verizonwireless.com Warner Music Group Inc. www.wmg.com |
