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Mobile Entertainment Services is a comprehensive report analysing the evolution of music, games and television for mobile devices.
This strategic research report from Berg Insight provides you with 140 pages of unique business intelligence and expert commentary on which to base your business decisions.
This report will allow you to understand:
> Users – how are they consuming mobile entertainment today and in the future?
> Music – how can the mobile industry benefit from the ongoing digital revolution in the music industry?
> Gaming – will the mobile handset become a major gaming platform?
> Television – what does it take to deliver an attractive user-experience on mobile handsets?
> Strategies – how should mobile operators and other industry players position themselves in entertainment?
What are the key business opportunities for value added services in the mobile industry? Berg Insight’s VAS Research Series is a unique series of analytical industry reports. Each title offers detailed analysis of current hot topics such as mobile messaging, mobile Internet, mobile TV, mobile broadband or mobile marketing. We put mobile VAS into a greater perspective, offering a realistic approach and accurate forecasts.
This report answers the following questions:
> Global reach of different media (2009)
> How will mobile entertainment evolve in the next decade?
> What will be the future role for mobile handsets in the entertainment industry?
> How will digital music be consumed by mobile users?
> Will mobile handsets become a significant gaming platform?
> What are the main challenges facing prospective providers of mobile TV?
> Which are the most successful business models and strategies for mobile entertainment?
> What impact will the demand for entertainment services have on the future mobile infrastructure?
> What lessons can be learned from the most advanced markets in Asia-Pacific?
All the prerequisites for the mobile phone to move beyond voice services on a large scale are finally in place, and the users are ready. The challenge now facing providers of mobile entertainment services is to adapt their products to the mobile medium. The mobile phone is not a terminal which encourages aimless browsing and exploring. The first challenge facing content producers is to ensure that their products are easy to find and sold through channels which the consumers feel confident using, traditionally operator portals or branded stores.
Berg Insight believes that platform and terminal specific stores will increase in popularity with publishers and consumers alike as they minimize the technical challenges for developers and assures good quality for the user. A decisive factor will be usability, notably advanced search functions, but also features such as user recommendations.
Choosing the correct partner, and to some extent platform, will be crucial. It is a tough sale to charge consumers for content over mobile which is often available for free on the PC, but it is not impossible.
User surveys show that there is a willingness to pay reasonable fees among a large part of the user base, and that there is room in the household entertainment budget for mobile contents. Berg Insight recommends content providers to explore new price models, such as pay-per-session and subscriptions, to create more dependable revenue streams. There are numerous examples of how this can be done for different types of contents.
We believe that as streaming and connectedness become more prevalent as content concepts, business models based on sales of access rather than sales of downloadable products will increase. It is likely that the content industry’s economic model will gradually be approaching that of the mobile industry’s, defining results in terms of average revenue per user rather than one-time sales.
To reach the majority of users who are not yet willing to pay for mobile services, Berg Insight recommends exploring applications as vehicles for advertising, as well as contents sold bundled with other digital goods or even physical products. Surveys show that young and frequent mobile users have large and fluid social networks with which they stay in constant contact. In developed markets, mobile users are a sub-group of computer users, who expect to be seen and heard, and who enjoy creating, influencing and sharing contents.
Successful mobile services across the board and the globe enable and encourage networking, communication, interactivity and creativity.
Berg Insight strongly recommends not only content producers to already early in the design work reflect on how these features can be incorporated in their products, but that also portal and shop managers do the same.
Complementing the mobile activity with a fixed base allows for richer features and higher customer loyalty. For a content provider coming from the fixed side on the other hand, the mobile presence should be a well-designed and integrated branch of the overall strategy.
The mobile phone as an entertainment terminal features a number of unique characteristics: it is highly personal, always connected and knows where it is. All these are properties that can be incorporated to craft highly creative and original applications.
One of the main challenges will be to find motivating factors for operators to get involved. Volume-based subscriptions are today a stumbling block for usage, and proliferation of flat-fee contracts are a critical success factor for mobile data services to take off. Fixed rates are a catalyst to make the existing online activities such as e-mail, search, instant messaging, electronic commerce and current Internet trends such as blogging and social networking expand into the mobile arena. A capped monthly fee is also the requisite to encourage off-portal browsing. Fixed fees however also remove one of the key incitements for network owners to promote these types of services as they put higher pressure on the networks without generating more revenue. Berg Insight recommends that operators begin by offering differently sized subscriptions of minutes or bytes, and then increasingly bundle these with services such as TV and music, as a way to retain customers and to maintain revenue per subscriber.
Mobile players, especially operators, need to embrace the idea that everyone stands to win from an enticing and comprehensive mobile ecosystem, and should at this stage of establishment and expansion focus on figuring out how they can fit in and contribute rather than how to stifle competition. This report looks at challenges as well as strategies for successfully overcoming them specifically for music, TV and video services as well as games.
Executive summary
All the prerequisites for the mobile phone to move beyond voice services on a large scale are finally in place, and the users are ready. The challenge now facing providers of mobile entertainment services is to adapt their products to the mobile medium. The mobile phone is not a terminal which encourages aimless browsing and exploring. The first challenge facing content producers is to ensure that their products are easy to find and sold through channels which the consumers feel confident using, traditionally operator portals or branded stores.
Berg Insight believes that platform and terminal specific stores will increase in popularity with publishers and consumers alike as they minimize the technical challenges for developers and assures good quality for the user. A decisive factor will be usability, notably advanced search functions, but also features such as user recommendations. Choosing the correct partner, and to some extent platform, will be crucial. It is a tough sale to charge consumers for content over mobile which is often available for free on the PC, but it is not impossible. User surveys show that there is a willingness to pay reasonable fees among a large part of the user base, and that there is room in the household entertainment budget for mobile contents. Berg Insight recommends content providers to explore new price models, such as pay-per-session and subscriptions, to create more dependable revenue streams. This report contains numerous examples of how this can be done for different types of contents.
We believe that as streaming and connectedness become more prevalent as content concepts, business models based on sales of access rather than sales of downloadable products will increase. It is likely that the content industry’s economic model will gradually be approaching that of the mobile industry’s, defining results in terms of average revenue per user rather than one-time sales.
To reach the majority of users who are not yet willing to pay for mobile services, Berg Insight recommends exploring applications as vehicles for advertising, as well as contents sold bundled with other digital goods or even physical products. Surveys show that young and frequent mobile users have large and fluid social networks with which they stay in constant contact. In developed markets, mobile users are a sub-group of computer users, who expect to be seen and heard, and who enjoy creating, influencing and sharing contents. Successful mobile services across the board and the globe enable and encourage networking, communication, interactivity and creativity. Berg Insight strongly recommends not only content producers to already early in the design work reflect on how these features can be incorporated in their products, but that also portal and shop managers do the same.
Complementing the mobile activity with a fixed base allows for richer features and higher customer loyalty. For a content provider coming from the fixed side on the other hand, the mobile presence should be a well-designed and integrated branch of the overall strategy. The mobile phone as an entertainment terminal features a number of unique characteristics: it is highly personal, always connected and knows where it is. All these are properties that can be incorporated to craft highly creative and original applications, as exemplified in this report.
One of the main challenges will be to find motivating factors for operators to get involved. Volume-based subscriptions are today a stumbling block for usage, and proliferation of flatfee contracts are a critical success factor for mobile data services to take off. Fixed rates are a catalyst to make the existing online activities such as e-mail, search, instant messaging, electronic commerce and current Internet trends such as blogging and social networking expand into the mobile arena. A capped monthly fee is also the requisite to encourage offportal browsing. Fixed fees however also remove one of the key incitements for network owners to promote these types of services as they put higher pressure on the networks without generating more revenue. Berg Insight recommends that operators begin by offering differently sized subscriptions of minutes or bytes, and then increasingly bundle these with services such as TV and music, as a way to retain customers and to maintain revenue per subscriber.
Mobile players, especially operators, need to embrace the idea that everyone stands to win from an enticing and comprehensive mobile ecosystem, and should at this stage of establishment and expansion focus on figuring out how they can fit in and contribute rather than how to stifle competition. This report looks at challenges as well as strategies for successfully overcoming them specifically for music, TV and video services as well as games.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents i
List of Figures. iv
Executive summary1
1 Introduction.3
2 Music..7
2.1 Products and packaging 7
2.1.1 Traditional music products7
2.1.2 New digital music products..8
2.2 Distribution channels.10
2.2.1 Downloading .10
2.2.2 Streaming 11
2.3 Geographical markets ..13
2.3.1 United States .14
2.3.2 United Kingdom ..15
2.3.3 France ..16
2.3.4 Germany..16
2.3.5 Japan.17
2.3.6 South Korea18
2.3.7 China .19
2.3.8 Brazil..20
2.3.9 Uganda.21
2.4 Industry players 21
2.4.1 Mobile operators .22
2.4.2 Handset manufacturers24
2.4.3 Device manufacturers ..28
2.4.4 Internet Service Providers ..30
2.4.5 Content aggregators .31
2.4.6 Online industry players 34
2.5 Challenges and recommendations 37
2.5.1 Finding the right business model for digital music 37
2.5.2 Merging to the mobile arena.38
2.5.3 The role of the music company40
2.5.4 The role of the mobile operator40
3 Gaming 43
3.1 The mobile handset as a gaming platform.43
3.2 The player 44
3.3 Mobile game concepts .45
3.3.1 Mobile versions of online games 46
3.3.2 Location sensitivity .46
3.3.3 Mixed reality ..48
3.3.4 Multiplayer games ..48
3.3.5 Natural interfaces 52
3.3.6 Ad-funded games53
3.3.7 Virtual products 55
3.4 Business models .56
3.4.1 Value chain.57
3.4.2 Distribution .58
3.4.3 Application stores59
3.4.4 Pricing ..61
3.5 Recommendations .62
4 TV and video.65
4.1 The next step in the evolution of television 65
4.2 Broadcasting technologies.68
4.2.1 Streaming over mobile networks 69
4.2.2 3GPP: IMB, MBMS and TDtv.71
4.2.3 Analogue receivers in handsets ..74
4.2.4 DAB-based technologies: T-DMB, DAB-IP.77
4.2.5 DVB-based technologies: DVB-H and DVB-IP.85
4.2.6 MediaFLO93
4.2.7 ISDB-T (One-Seg) ..96
4.2.8 ATSC-M/H97
4.2.9 WiFi and WiMAX..98
4.3 Strategies.99
4.3.1 Unicast or broadcast ..100
4.3.2 Industry players and business models .101
4.3.3 Content innovation ..108
4.3.4 Financing..116
4.4 Challenges and recommendations .120
4.4.1 Regulations .122
4.4.2 Technology..122
4.4.3 Business models and strategies ..127
4.4.4 Content and usage..131
5 Strategic advice to mobile entertainment providers..135
5.1 Network operators 135
5.2 Content producers and aggregators..137
Glossary 141
Index
List of Figures
Figure 2.1: Example of screen images for Melodeo’s mobile music application12
Figure 2.2: Digital music revenues from online and mobile channels (World 2004–2008)13
Figure 2.3: Sales numbers for mobile music in Japan (2008)..17
Figure 2.4: Nokia 5730 XpressMusic .27
Figure 3.1: FIFA football game on Nokia N85 ..44
Figure 3.2: Screenshots from the mobile and online versions of the Mogi game..51
Figure 3.3: Illustration by NTT DoCoMo explaining the principle of Chokkan games .53
Figure 4.1: The evolution of mobile TV media ..66
Figure 4.2: Comparison of downlink data capacity demand per user by services 70
Figure 4.3: Analogue TV switch-off dates for different countries.75
Figure 4.4: T-DMB business model 83
Figure 4.5: Strategic options for deploying mobile TV ..100
Figure 4.6: The mobile TV value chain ..102
Figure 4.7: Examples of roles played by broadcasters in the mobile TV value chain103
Figure 4.8: Examples of aggregator led business models for mobile TV 104
Figure 4.9: Examples of roles played by mobile operators in the mobile TV value chain ..106
Figure 4.10: Example of revenue flows generated by fee-based mobile TV services108
Figure 4.11: Revenue models for mobile TV ..117
For full details, please email keithw@cmsinfo.com
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