The Third Screen

Filed in archive Business Trends on March 9, 2006

Information week reported that mobile phone content is forecast to reach $43 billion worldwide by 2010, up from $5.2 billion in 2004. Content covers music, games, and video. The study is a forecast by research firm iSuppli Corp.

Video offers the most significant long-term opportunity in the mobile-content market, according to Mark Kirstein, iSuppli vice president of multimedia services and content. Growth in the mobile TV market will rely on new phone deployments, iSuppli said, estimating TV-capable phones will only represent 12 percent of the market by 2010.

To be sure, those growth projections sound impressive, but what about mobile advertising? According to Ad Age, advertising and cell phone-based content aren't mixing well yet. The article goes on to point out that advertisers are not even in any discussions about getting their message onto phones.

Nevertheless, a survey by Airwide Solutions, a mobile software company, suggests that there's a huge appetite among marketers to get connected to cellphones, given their very personal nature. The survey, published Feb. 27, claims that 89% of major brands are planning to market via mobile phones by 2008, and more than half of brands plan to spend between 5% and 25% of their marketing budget in the medium in the next five years.

In my humble opinion, advertisers will play a bigger role in the wireless universe once consumers start feeling "digital sticker shock," as they add up all the seemingly small charges for new content.

A number of commentators feel that wireless carriers are standing in the way of progress and suggest that carriers want to protect a pricing model that favors subscriptions over a wide array of free ad-supported content that cuts them out of the revenue picture.