Killer App… Mobile Content Aggregation
As everyone is trying to predict the next killer application for mobile, I thought i’d throw in my opinion.
At the W2Forum Launch party in Soho, London, I was asked on several occasions what I thought would become the next success in the mobile industry.
The mobile content market is ever evolving, and new pricing strategies, and content services are being exploited on a regular basis, and there currently seems to be no let-up in its growth of innovation and youth attraction. One of the main drivers of content, is the “All you can eat” data packages, which for a set monthly fee, you can download an unlimited (Yeah Right! 250MB on O2 for example) amount of data per month. But even through this “unlimited” offering is always truly unlimited, content should always be “made for mobile” ensuring that the best CODECs and compression ratios are used for the mobile device, therefor reducing the data download requirements.
The mobile content industry has been seen as a very lucrative market, and has had its share of bad press with companies like Jamba offering subscription services when a user tries to download a single ringtone, charging them every week without notice. But recently, this has been cleaned up, and the companies must make it very clear now that they are offering a subscription and not a single download. But none the less, this relatively new revenue stream has attracted thousands of companies to offer premium content to mobile.
Definition - Premium Content: An item that is viewed by the end user after making a payment. This content item can be a Ringtone, Video, Wallpaper, Horoscope, Joke, News Subscription, etc..
As there are so many companies now offering these services to mobile, the user now faces too much choice. Where will the user go to find “Strawberry Fields by the Beatles” as a ringtone? The first place i guess they will look is their carriers portal, and then if they cannot find it there, they will give up.
Solution
A product like Google’s Froogle or Kelkoo, which offers price comparison can be utilised. With a database of all the mobile content storefronts, a user can perform a search for the content item they are looking for, and a list of variants will be returned. This will give the user the chance to find not only the cheapest, but also related content items (wallpaper, or other ringtones), and special offers.
The problem that such a solution will currently face, is the on-portal content that is only available through the carriers network. This, however can have a benefit to the carrier, as it can promote content items to other carriers customers which may encourage the user to switch. Another problem with many mobile storefront solutions is that they perform “on the fly” transcoding, adapting the mobile content to the users device after they have requested it, so the resulting content item can not be guaranteed. The final issue, which I hope will be addressed by store front and CMS solutions, is that they should provide a query feed in RSS or ATOM, that allows search engines to query the content store, and get returned an XML results page.
Benefits
This will provide a way for the content providers to promote their content, and with some business cases, they could also “pay their way” to increase their search rankings.
Affiliation programs will help to create further revenue streams
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