I picked up a press release from the UK Informa company, a publishing and research company in the field of telecom. An Informa Telecoms & Media report (their link!) shows UK mobile content market is on the cusp of becoming multi-billion dollar industry (beautiful word: cusp). However you will not get excited jJust reading the press release and comparing it with a European report of five years ago.
The report concludes that the UK mobile content and services market is on the verge of becoming a multi-billion dollar industry provided the sector can tap into an addressable market approaching 50% of UK mobile users, a report shows this week. In the study, entitled "UK Mobile Content Survey: What Consumers Want almost 2,000 mobile subscribers in the UK participated.
Results from the survey reveal that the UK mobile content market was worth £661 million in 2006, with 50% of revenues coming from the "mobile cash rich" 25-34 year olds. Those revenues look set to skyrocket should the wireless industry generate a more consistent spending behaviour. This conclusion is based on an analysis of the present usage. In the UK one-fifth of the respondents purchase a minimum of one item of content every three months; the report calls this a regular buyer. The survey uncovers a further 30 percent of occasional consumers that will purchase at least one item of content per year. They are called occasional spenders. If the wireless industry can encourage these occasional spenders to regularly consume content, the addressable mobile-content-market spend over a three-month period will expand by 150%
Almost 50 percent of respondents said mobile content prices were too high, but that they were willing to spend 5 GBP as the optimum figure consumers are willing to spend per month on top of their voice and messaging fees. Services and content priced above the 5 GBP monthly threshold will appeal to less than 5 percent of UK mobile users.
The report also indicates that TV on mobiles could cannibalise revenues from other services within the mobile content ecosystem, mobile advertising might subsidise mobile content and inflate the mobile content user base. Besides, side-loading music and ringtones on a mobile from a PC will not help either.
It is clear that mobile Internet has grown from a slow and clumsy monochrome experience into a tool for news, entertainment and other services on the move, in colour, with movies and photographs and graphics. But the mobile industry has been slow to eliminate the financial and technical barriers and will have to come up with smart pricing, incentive technical solutions and innovative partnerships.
Is this report valuable for the UK mobile content industry or the European mobile content industry? It basically tells the mobile content industry and operators that they still have a long way to go to convince consumers and business people to use mobile content services. It tells the operators that they should stop introducing the next fabulous thing such as TV on your mobile and first spend time on introducing teletext like services, followed by internet like services. And think about mobile TV whenever they have solved the technical problems and business propositions.
So far mobile content services have been a white lie. For years the services figured as much promising services. In 2002 the EC published a special report about mobile content. This study was carried out between May 2001 and December 2001. Thirty-three interviews with market players were performed. The results were validated by a Steering Committee of 12 members covering a large part of the mobile content industry. Basic conclusion: News, services and entertainment delivered to our mobile phones could be the next big thing, but only if all the partners in an increasingly complex business can find ways to co-operate. Mobile services will only become popular if the companies responsible for content can make enough money to be able to do their jobs well. But a key problem, says this report prepared by Arthur Andersen Belgium for the European Commission's Information Society DG, is that European mobile network operators are being greedy. Desperate to recoup the huge sums spent on licences and technology for next-generation services such as GPRS and UMTS, they are reluctant to pay realistic rates to the companies whose job it is to provide content such as news, games and transport information. With little high-quality content to attract users, it is not surprising that mobile information services are proving unpopular.
It looks like nothing has changed in the mobile content industry except technology.
Blog Posting Number: 774
Tags: mobile content, mobile content industry
Showing posts with label digital information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital information. Show all posts
Monday, June 04, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Bytes intensive storage
Three years on and there will be more digital information than we can store. That is one of the conclusions of a report by IDC. The report sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content cascading through our world today. The researchers assumed that an average digital file gets replicated three times.
IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year and forecasts a staggering 988 billion gigabytes – 988 exabytes of digital information created in 2010. It is an amount of information which can not be imagined, not even with stacks of books or iPods. The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totalled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003. One of the sponsors of the report, data-storage company EMC Corp., commissioned IDC's new look.
Of course there was a fight over the methods immediately. The Berkeley researchers had taken a different trail, as they also counted non-electronic information, such as analogue radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And they examined original data only, not all the times things got copied. On the other hand, the IDC numbers ballooned with the inclusion of content as it was created and as it was reproduced - for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.
But it really does not matter, whatever method you take. The amount increases really fast. When our first grandsons were born I nicknamed them the Tera Kids, boys with a terabyte of digital information by the time that they are eighteen years old. They will have built up a personal file of documents, forms, music, movies and medical scans. This file will be scattered all over the place, from hospital to schools, to computers of their providers. How can they keep track of them and access them?
One of the big problems is also that information gets copied roughly three times. This looks to me a conservative estimate. If you look at many of the newspaper and broadcast services, they copy the news items of wire services like Reuters and AP, often without adding another word or observation. But the news services have to be complete to attract traffic and if they do not attract traffic they will not get any revenues from advertisements. Just linking to the news wire services is not good enough. But a de duplication service would be a solution. Keep only the original source and delete all the copies.
But it is not really the text items which are increasing the digital storage. Music, photographs and video are more bytes-intensive. So we will need compression, storage and distribution tools for them. Undoubtedly people work on these algorithms. But who will come up with an impressive solution and when?
(Some years ago a Dutch electro engineer Jan Sloot claimed to have a solution for video compression. Roel Pieper, former Tandem, Compaq and Philips official, as well as private investor Marcel Boekhoorn – these days owner of the free paper De Pers - believed in the inventions and started to promote it with private equity firms. However before the solution could be demonstrated, the inventor died and took the solution along in his grave. It reads like a book and could be a movie of myth, greediness and deception. A book has been published in Dutch under the title Broncode – Source code - in 2004 ; movie rights have been signed.)
Blog Posting Number: 689
Tags:
exabytes, 
digital information, 
compression
IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year and forecasts a staggering 988 billion gigabytes – 988 exabytes of digital information created in 2010. It is an amount of information which can not be imagined, not even with stacks of books or iPods. The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totalled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003. One of the sponsors of the report, data-storage company EMC Corp., commissioned IDC's new look.
Of course there was a fight over the methods immediately. The Berkeley researchers had taken a different trail, as they also counted non-electronic information, such as analogue radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And they examined original data only, not all the times things got copied. On the other hand, the IDC numbers ballooned with the inclusion of content as it was created and as it was reproduced - for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.
But it really does not matter, whatever method you take. The amount increases really fast. When our first grandsons were born I nicknamed them the Tera Kids, boys with a terabyte of digital information by the time that they are eighteen years old. They will have built up a personal file of documents, forms, music, movies and medical scans. This file will be scattered all over the place, from hospital to schools, to computers of their providers. How can they keep track of them and access them?
One of the big problems is also that information gets copied roughly three times. This looks to me a conservative estimate. If you look at many of the newspaper and broadcast services, they copy the news items of wire services like Reuters and AP, often without adding another word or observation. But the news services have to be complete to attract traffic and if they do not attract traffic they will not get any revenues from advertisements. Just linking to the news wire services is not good enough. But a de duplication service would be a solution. Keep only the original source and delete all the copies.
But it is not really the text items which are increasing the digital storage. Music, photographs and video are more bytes-intensive. So we will need compression, storage and distribution tools for them. Undoubtedly people work on these algorithms. But who will come up with an impressive solution and when?
(Some years ago a Dutch electro engineer Jan Sloot claimed to have a solution for video compression. Roel Pieper, former Tandem, Compaq and Philips official, as well as private investor Marcel Boekhoorn – these days owner of the free paper De Pers - believed in the inventions and started to promote it with private equity firms. However before the solution could be demonstrated, the inventor died and took the solution along in his grave. It reads like a book and could be a movie of myth, greediness and deception. A book has been published in Dutch under the title Broncode – Source code - in 2004 ; movie rights have been signed.)Blog Posting Number: 689
Tags:
exabytes, digital information, compression
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