CARRIER INVESTMENTS MOVE TOWARD CONTENT

If Hollywood is the land where dreams are made real, then Las Vegas is the land where dreams seem real, make flirtatious offers to get you interested, but then walk away and leave you with nothing.

At the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association's Wireless IT and Entertainment event, which was held in Las Vegas in late October, there was a palpable sense that the purveyors of multimedia mobile content were offering themselves salaciously to the wireless carriers in attendance. But is the mobile content dream real?

Both carriers and content providers seem to think so. “I had a really good meeting with Fox Broadcasting, and you get a sense that the content guys are taking mobile seriously as a broadband distribution medium,” said Rob Hyatt, director of data product management at Cingular Wireless.

Dean Fresonke, CEO of ClearSky Mobile Media, a content syndication company, said, “Data coverage has gotten to the point where carriers and content developers have a lot of value to offer each other.”

With coverage having improved, the next step in increasing the viability of mobile content distribution is making it easy for users to access and pay for.

“An area we're really investing in is making it easier for users to purchase content directly from the handset,” Hyatt said. “We're simplifying the process of finding it and allowing people to use text messaging to order it and download it.”

Also, carriers will have to continue to invest in more flexible back office technology in their billing systems and customer profile management databases, said Rob Chimsky, vice president of the technology and integration practice at inCode Telecom.

“You drive applications through simplicity,” Chimsky said. “Carriers traditionally have had different applications, different servers and multiple silos. There is a need for a reference architecture to sit across these platforms.”

Kendra VanderMeulen, executive vice president at InfoSpace Mobile, added, “We have to make it easier for carriers to introduce and support new content applications regardless of the network, the handsets they have available or the browser software they've chosen. Those things can't become hurdles to distribution.”

In most cases, MMS services are giving carriers their first exposure to distributing multimedia content. With MMS interoperability and multi-casting, Hyatt said mobile data will evolve from a business, which today is predominantly messaging and downloadable ring tones, to a significant distribution medium for online games, music samples and movie trailers delivered by major gaming developers, record companies and Hollywood studios. Under that model, it could be the content providers that are paying the carriers to distribute their content — much like the TV advertising model.

Cingular and other carriers are still in the early stages of evaluating which content providers to work with. “It's a process we certainly haven't mastered yet,” Hyatt said, but he added that carriers are most likely to invest in content that already has succeeded to a degree in another medium — such as games already popular on home gaming platforms or multimedia promos for popular TV shows. “As a carrier, you need to know the content you're going to invest in is something that will spread virally.”