Bango goes it alone

Like most male residents of the U.K, Anil Malhotra has adopted his local football (soccer to us Yanks) club as his own. But rooting for Cambridge United, which plays in one of England's lower divisions and has a modest marketing budget, isn't quite the same as being a fan of Manchester United, which is one of the most valuable sports franchises on the planet. However, as vice president of alliances and marketing for wireless content provider Bango, Malhotra is trying to put the two on somewhat more equal footing when it comes to reaching out to wireless users.

Instead of trying to bring content through partnerships with carriers or content providers, Bango is taking a direct-to-consumer approach, offering its mobile content to anyone. Using what it bills as an open, global platform, the company allows users to either browse their site or receive downloads via SMS codes and numbers advertised in traditional print publications.

“Bango looks at the world as being full of content providers of all sizes and scales,” Malhotra said in explaining why the company hasn't signed any exclusive deals with content providers or carriers. “When you go in directly through one of the other companies you really lose control of how your content is marketed.”

That's not to say the company has shunned content providers and carriers. Over the past year, the company has signed deals with Muvee Technologies and Player One as well as O2, Cingular and Vodafone to provide services.

Like a Blockbuster store in the U.S., Bango sees itself as providing a complimentary service to the carrier that has exclusive rights to a ring tone or movie clip for a limited amount of time. After the exclusivity is lost, Bango will continue carrying the content in its library, thereby offloading the cost for carriers.

“In the past, carriers were ambivalent about the Bango business model,” Malhotra said. “Eventually carriers have come to love us because they've realized that this is a huge market. The carrier can go sign the exclusive deal for a new movie and that's the head of the very long marketing chain. We help monetize the tail of that chain.”

In fact, according to Malhotra, because carriers don't have the associated costs, every piece of content that they sell through Bango or off their content decks is more profitable than content sold on-deck.

Either way, after a couple of false starts, the market for mobile content is starting to take off. According to Jupiter Research, mobile entertainment alone will be a $59 billion market by 2009. However, in related research, the company found that while 44% of consumers are interested in mobile video, only 19% are willing to pay a premium for it.

Malhotra, though, believes that as smaller providers develop mobile content they will be able to draw in niche markets much better than a larger mass producer.

“We believe [Cambridge] should be able to use the mobile Internet just the same as a club like Manchester United,” he said.