CONTENT IS A KING

Over recent years, the 3GSM World Congress has provided a rings-side seat for what has proved to be a drawn-out courtship ritual between two sectors with very different business models, cultures and traditions. At this year’s event in Barcelona, potential suitors included 85 exhibitors that described themselves as content providers.

A number of recurring themes emerged. Among mobile operators there is a growing, if sometimes reluctant, acceptance that restricting customers to their own portals will ultimately prove to be counter-productive. Major media brands are looking for ubiquitous distributions; they will partner with operators with good market reach, but will also sell though intermediaries and exploit the intrinsic strengths of their own brands to sell” direct-to-consumer”

With content increasingly available though multiple channels, ‘search’ was a hot topic. Google used the Congress to announce that Vodafone had joined T-Mobile and Motorola in its growing portfolio of major mobile partners and Orange UK adopted m-spatial’s Local Search & Discovery Engine.

While business model for search on mobile could be similar to those for the PC, one major difference is that search results need to be relevant to the capabilities of the user’s device.

In the language of the media industry , ‘ marrying the long tail with powerful discovery’ is the crucial next step in maximizing life-time revenues from the millions of tracks and clips in the global back-catalogue.