Fox: Mobile content needs balance of payment models

LOS ANGELES--Fox Interactive senior vice president and general manager John Smelzer today said that mobile content will require a variety of revenue streams to be successful. Some will be subscription-based, some will come bundled, others will be supported by ads, and much of it will be just plain free.

“There has to be all sorts of models, both subscription and ad-supported,” Smelzer said, speaking at the iHollywood Forum’s Mobile Entertainment Summit. While the revenue mix may be different, he added that the key to driving user adoption of all types of content is “to make the entry point easy.”

Of all the major TV and media networks, Fox was one of the earliest to key in on mobile media. It launched the industry’s first mobisodes based on popular Fox TV shows as well as original shows. It has proliferated its Fox Sports, Fox News and other TV programming across all of the carriers’ networks in both unicast and multicast formats. And on the Web media side, it has been pushing MySpace onto the handset, starting with MVNO Helio and then moving to Cingular as well as supporting one-off promotions with carriers like Verizon Wireless in its battle of the bands with MySpace musicians.

But just as all of that content occupies disparate spots in the wired world, it can’t be shoehorned into one mobile content model on the mobile data network, Smelzer said. For example, Fox has sectioned off content from its Fox Sports programming into free, ad-supported and premium content, offering linear channel programming as part of a TV bundle on carriers’ video networks, on-demand programming as part of a special subscription, and basic features on the Fox Sports ad-subsidized WAP portal. “Sports scores for instance are ubiquitous,” Smelzer said. “You have to offer them for free or supported through ads.” Customers simply won’t pay for something they can get readily at no charge through dozens of other media, including other media on the phone, he said. And while TV content is an obvious content for bundling, there are other types of content that Fox believes are tailor-made for direct subscription.

“MySpace can stand on its own two feet,” Smelzer said. “It doesn’t need to be packaged with other social networking sites.”

The industry, however, is still working out the details of how various content bundles can be packaged and billed for, and the media companies and carriers are still working out what content to offer over limited resources, Smelzer said. Multicast TV such as Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, for instance, can’t support the hundreds of channels of a digital cable network, and the small size and limited user interface of the phone mean that the complexity of Web sites and Internet applications have to be toned far down in the mobile world.

In order to expand their reach, many content providers are looking to expand off the carrier’s deck, giving themselves more breathing room in what is becoming a crowded mobile Internet portal.

“I think you’re going to see multiple points of entry,” Smelzer said, “but we intend to be in business with the carriers.”