Protecting the brand

Cingular is once again going after the denizens of the Web, this time targeting the users of video-posting site YouTube by sponsoring an online battle of the bands. YouTube is one of those content monsters run amok, fed by thousands of users posting video streams to the site every day.

Cingular is fairly forward-looking in embracing the new medium of user-generated content. It may not be supporting user-content creation yet, but it is certainly courting the users themselves. If Cingular can transition those users from the wired Web to mobile Web, it could be rewarded with a bonanza of data revenues.

The content you create yourself is ultimately more valuable to you than the content of a media company, and these MySpace, YouTube, Friendster and LiveJournal users are spending hours of their days uploading megabyte after megabyte of text, audio and video content to their personal pages — with full knowledge that only a handful of people are likely to access them.

The aggregate of that data traffic could spell millions in revenues for Cingular or any other mobile carrier willing to embrace the format. But — and this is a big but — that format is also something Cingular would have no control over fundamentally, and any attempt at censoring or editing that content would not only be practically impossible but would certainly earn the wrath of the user community.

Therein lies the rub. There's a pot of money to be made, but that cash may be poisonous to the reputation and brands carriers have carefully crafted. In some ways, carriers have put themselves in this trap. They've set themselves up as the overarching brands over their content portals. It's a smart way to ensure your place in the value chain, but it also makes them ultimately liable for every bit of content that passes over their networks.

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