The market for premium mobile content platforms grew almost 20% in 2007, resulting in a $3.4 billion share of the $18.5 billion of revenue generated by the mobile premium content market, according to recent research by MultiMedia Intelligence (http://www.MultiMediaIntelligence.com). As cellular subscribers worldwide increasingly look for personalization and enhanced entertainment content on their mobile handsets, subscribers are continuing to purchase more premium content, such as ringtones, music, mobile games and video. Mobile content platform companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, Ericsson, Motricity NMS Communications and Qualcomm provide key systems and tools to in-take, catalog, store, and deliver content.
“Many industries would be thrilled with 20% growth. While the mobile content platform and digital commerce services companies find it disappointing, much of the issue is out of their hands,” according to Frank Dickson, Chief Research Officer with MultiMedia Intelligence. “The ringtone market is softening while other content categories are failing to live-up to expectations. Additionally, the mobile content platform and digital commerce services companies sit in the mobile content ecosystem stuck between the more powerful operators and content owners. The operators have tremendous power as they own the subscriber. The content companies have power as they own the content that individuals want. The revenue distribution among the different industry segments reflects this power imbalance.”
MultiMedia Intelligence’s new research also found:
Digital commerce services market was not quite as strong as the content platform market. Mobile digital commerce service companies provide the financial systems underlying the commerce transaction process. The recent MMI research found that the digital commerce segment, comprised of companies like Amdocs, Bango, Comverse and Valista grew at slightly less than 10%. The transition to an off-deck dominated content market is developing in North America. However, a stronger transition is stymied as the mobile content discovery and purchase process is still too challenging to consumers.
Questionable and unprofessional market activity by some off-deck providers is drawing the ire of carriers such as Sprint Nextel, which recently enacted strict guidelines and is enforcing them with penalties for content partners. MultiMedia Intelligence sees other carriers following suit, not only in the US but in Europe as well, in hopes of cleaning up rogue off-deck providers.
The market will begin to see the emergence of advertising in premium content. Video will be the dominant driver, yet other content types will see growth as well.
Mobile music is still dominated by ringtones; however the growth of the category is muted as the decline of polyphonic ringtones eats away at the gains made by music ringtunes. Ringtones will remain the dominant music category through out the forecast period, despite strong growth in full track downloads, streaming music and ringback tones.
The research, “Mobile Content Platforms: Mobile 2.0 and Advertising Join the Party,” covers the software platforms used to deliver & monetize content to mobile handsets. The research contains five-year worldwide forecasts of global market revenue for video, music, gaming and images. The forecast for the emerging category of advertising in premium is included. The report also presents market share in these areas for mobile operators, content providers and content-enablement companies. The report provides a further breakdown of revenue share for the content-enablement companies by revenue share of music including ringtone, ringtune, ringback, over-the-air full music track download, streaming music revenue by region. The report also contains profiles of major mobile content enablement platform companies and trends and predictions for the industry.
About MultiMedia Intelligence
MultiMedia Intelligence provides actionable intelligence on the markets and technologies for delivering IP video to the Nth screen. With a broad “ecosystem-based” perspective that moves beyond the classic ‘three screens’ of TVs, mobile handsets, and computers, we identify the opportunities in enabling and monetizing digital media on a multi-platform, multi-network basis.