Mobile Content World seemed to start with an air of excitement this year, as many familiar faces re-acquainted at Sydney’s Star City Casino for 2 days of panels and presentations on mobile content in Australia.

The enthusiasm may have been dampened by Gary Hayes in his keynote address saying that perhaps the industry has not grown up and might be likened to an adolescent. He cited interoperability as one of the biggest issues facing the industry.

Better news was not forthcoming from Claudia Sagripanti, who said the latest report from AIMIA’s MCIDG showed spending on mobile content is down from 2005 figures.

Ira Rubeinstein, from Sony Pictures Digital, the keynote international speaker, painted a bleak picture of the challenges of maintaining a culture of legal transfers of digital entertainment citing his mother and daughter being part of the “linked and liberated”, “engaged and entertained” community. SPD strategy for mobile distribution includes the sale of movies on memory sticks.

Jennifer Wilson, from HWW, extended upon this discussion by focussing on social networks and the construct of digital public and private spaces. She talked about the “alpha” user who is not always the early adopter in a group, but is the one who has the most influence amongst his/her group. She gave a demo of a mososo HWW has created (and yet to launch) called Tribz, which has a sophisticated feature set that is able to serve a cross-platform social network and serve them across SMS, IM and email.

Olivia Hilton, the new CEO of Jumbuck, says that for people to be part of a mobile community they need critical mass, identity, ownership, usability and accessibility. She also says that people have changed, citing research that shows 15-25 year olds are 50% more extrovert than 20 years ago.

There were several panels throughout this two day conference and they not only allowed for strong interaction from the audience but also meant speakers were not able to just give a sales pitch - which tends to happen at some of these events.

The most interesting of the panels was one featuring a selection of “real users” who were not only interesting but very funny, including the one member who had five phones in total and carried two with her at all times. You could see the exascerbation on the faces of the telco representatives when the panel explained the lengths they go to avoid paying call and data costs - including timing limited free calls to hang up before incurring costs and sideloading music instead of buying ringtones. None of the panel of “real users” said they had viewed video content - apart from clips they or friends had made, and the 16 year old guy who had subscribed to Big Brother on 3.

This is one of the issues faced by Frank Chindamo, from Fun Little Movies, who provided an entertaining presentation and showed some really cool stuff - like Random Acts of Kindness. Although he is selling content to portals around the world there still seems to be an issue about audience attraction to this type of content here in Australia.

There was much discussion about the role the carriers are playing in educating the audience - and although they say they are doing this, the overwhelming evidence shows that their efforts are falling short of what is needed. Arun Gupta from India says that every new phone customer is invited to an after hours introduction session that provides them with a step by step explanation of what content is available and how they can access it. Could this happen in Australia?

Most obviously missing from the forum were representatives from the major commercial networks. Particularly considering that Telstra came out with some fairly strong positioning (calling it a tectonic shift) in regard to its ambitions to dominate the mobile and broadband arenas which will put them in direct competition with the likes of the television channels and other multi-platform content providers like Fairfax and News Corp.

Once again there was much discussion about the portal / off-portal issue. While it’s understandable the telcos are attempting to control the user experience to maximise their revenue, the rhetoric that they are doing it to protect the user from a bad experience is now wearing thin. Particularly with companies like Bango at the conference who are offering a wap payment system that can be implemented by content providers within hours. This means that the massive amount of interactive and traditional media companies standing in the queue to talk with the telcos can now start working on a direct relationship with their audiences.

Fear of high data charges (bill shock) may be preventing the Australian audiences from exploring these off-portal options and therefore, we are still seeing the most successful content vendors are those placed in the carrier portals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.