From the archives - It's Throw Back Thursday time again

So this time ten years ago, I was just back from my second visit to The Electric Picnic in Ireland. By all accounts, I'd had a fab time despite rain and the ensuing mud. My review of the weekend is here.

Location Based Services

Meanwhile, 10 years ago, DoCoMo was trialling in-mall location based marketing. It's weird that this was 6 years AFTER we'd done this at ZagMe and even weirder is that it was 10 years ago and we're only just beginning to see location based services (or proximity as it's known now) come to fruition. Brand Republic wrote a half decent piece on the potential of mobile for marketing and advertising. Remember, this is pre iPhone App Store days and Nokia was the best selling manufacturer by a country mile.

Branded TV Channels

In September 2006, Anheuser Busch announced they were setting up and investing US$30 million in their own TV channel for Budweiser drinkers called Bud.TV. 10 years ago, this was forward thinking and arguably, ahead of its time as it closed down in 2009 as they deemed it too expensive to sustain and the audience couldn't easily access it. Critics suggested that it closed down as the content wasn't relevant and limited in its appeal. More on the demise of Bud.TV and other branded content channels here.I would suggest that timing is key. Branded channels per se are not necessarily a bad idea. Look at the content that Red Bull comes up with that now hits mainstream TV. Bud.TV may just have been ahead of its time.

Design

Stephanie and Bryan Rieger are long-serving designers and mobilists. They are mavens of what works in mobile design and this presentation, 'Letting Go', from 5 years ago is well worth a look to remind you of what's what in mobile design. It's also a lesson in how to create beautiful presentations. 

But what about the children?

Throughout my time in mobile, there have been people thinking about how to use mobile devices to monitor and track where their kids are. They are generally a terrible idea - if a teen wants to escape your digital clutches, they are more than capable of doing that with or without the fancy tracker you've bought. I'm not really sure why they keep resurfacing. However, this one that friend and mobile ally, Carlo Longino, wrote about back in 2004 takes the biscuit name-wise. Read all about 'TeenArriveAlive.com' over on Mobhappy. It's a great takedown and well worth a read.

More from the archives soon!

2013 is the year of Glastonbury Mobile

Well, at least according to the BBC, and the monster coverage they’re planning of Glastonbury Festival, they believe this will be the first Glastonbury that will be viewed more on mobile than any other device. It will be no mean feat to cover the festival and to deliver the content to the right people at the right time on whatever device they choose. Having delivered on the Olympics last year, this should be more straightforward – well apart from the conditions – there’s no newly-built, state-of-the-art media centre at the festival. Nevertheless, it’s still a big job.

As for the punters, like myself, who make the annual pilgrimage to the Pilton Pop Party, I wonder if there will be much improvement to mobile communications or to the festival experience via mobile? The app has never been much use to me – what we need is a really good map (where’s the Google maps version of the site?) and the mobile version of the marvellous Glasto Clashfinder. But instead, we get features that the sponsors think are a good idea but are of little use to us paying customers. Maybe this year will be different now that we have EE and their proposed investment in improved coverage for 2G, 3G and 4G…? (More on that here.)  Hey, the app sounds like it will be better too (I live in hope).

Any anyway, it’s almost impossible to see your mobile screen in the sun, or in the rain for that matter. You can’t hear your phone ring and even if you could, you can’t hear what anyone is saying. Battery life is still rubbish and mobile signal is flaky and SMS, probably the most useful feature, can be delayed by hours or even days! I will probably be leaving my fancy Android smartphone at home anyway and revert to my trusty N95 and bits of paper. I don’t want to lose a good phone in the mud as

Still, bring it on, I say. Find me dancing in my wellies to Portishead, Kenny Rogers and The Rolling Stones!

Essential reading from Tomi Ahonen – the Almanac 2010

Tomi’s done it again. He’s published his 2010 Almanac – a veritable smorgasbord of stats, information, graphs, charts, facts, figures and insight into the world of mobile. It’s 180 pages of mobile goodness, including 84 charts, sized to work as an ebook on your smartphone as well as your laptop. Very neat.

It is, in my view, essential reading for anyone with an interest in the world of mobile. Data in the e-book includes - Size of Mobile Industry; Customers; Handsets and Smartphones; Mobile Messaging including SMS and MMS; Mobile Internet; 7th Mass Medium; Music on Mobile; TV and Video; Gaming; Social Networking; Other services including News, Jokes, Adult, App Stores etc; Mobile Advertising; Voice calls; Enterprise services; Network Infrastructure; Digital Divide; and a Historical Timeline.

There is tabular data included - Index of Mobile Leadership for the 30 most advanced countries; major comparative data on 60 major mobile countries; the 25 countries with largest subscriber counts and 25 with highest penetration rates per capita; plus 25 countries with highest rate of 3G migration. Plus the 20 biggest mobile operator Groups.

The whole document is available for immediate download, has been released today, and costs only 9.99 Euros. The only place you can order it (it is not available at major booksellers like Amazon) is Tomi’s company website. 

Wanna know more and order it? – then check it out here.

Enjoy. I know I will!

Technorati Tags: tomi ahonen,almanac,statistics,mobile,2010

Mobile TV - is it going to happen?

Is Mobile TV reaching a Tipping Point? A recent report suggests there is consumer demand for the service. The US-based report from Quickplay tell us

"Nearly half of respondents (44%) do not know if their mobile operator even
offers a mobile TV and video service and a third (33%) of those questioned
cited cost as the main barrier for not accessing mobile TV. The demand for
consumers to watch mobile TV is there, with 65 per cent of respondents stating
that they are willing to spend time watching an advert if it meant that the
mobile TV or video content they consume is free or discounted. On the other side
of the coin, if mobile TV and video were to be charged for, 22 per cent said
that they would prefer a pay-per-use business model and 13 per cent outlined a
preference for an additional monthly subscription that would deliver the
content without adverts."

My own feeling is that Mobile TV will be a bit like cameraphones. No-one ever really saw the need for a cameraphone - who would want to take photos on the go? But it's hard for many to imagine getting a phone without a camera these days. Mobile TV will be like that. At the point that it's just there - there's a button on the keypad that says 'TV' and you press it and the TV comes on, and it's free or bundled with your tarriff in some way, it will become a no-brainer.

And despite Mobile TV being a small market today, it is already generating some nice revenues for network operators. In Italy, mobile TV revenues are already Euro 65.9m vs their mobile music revenues which stand at just Euros 16.3m (full-track and ringtones).

I suspect the research report may be a little biased as it has been commissioned by a Mobile TV services provider and there were only 500 respondents which is not representative of a country of 300m+. Nevertheless, the findings are pretty much in keeping with other stuff I've read on the topic.

Interesting days for TV.

MobiTV passes 4m

At least that's what Mobile Entertainment Magazine tells us this month. MobiTV claims to have over 4 million subscribers which is more than all of the IPTV customers in Europe. MobiTV is now adding a million subscribers every 6 months by whitelabelling their streaming TV services for mobile network operators globally.

Bearing in mind that MobiTV isn't the only mobile TV service out there either on or off-portal (Rok for example), I find this very encouraging. And I expect we might find a European surge in interest during Euro 2008 (I'm not sure what impact it will have on the UK market since England isn't playing...).

Yes, mobile TV is still small fry compared with some other mobile services. And implementation and execution to date by the network operators has been poor but it's another of those things that isn't going away.

Update 8 May 2008: Mobile TV is spreading in Europe and to the US (NY Times). "Every day in Switzerland, 40,000 people watch a 100-second television news broadcast on their cellphones. In Italy, a million people pay as much as 19 euros each ($29) a month to watch up to a dozen mobile TV channels."

Some links for a Monday morning

It's been one of those weekends.. all the best intentions to catch up with everything and only a fraction done of what I'd intended. And part of the intention was to catch up on my blogging. Still, here's a linkage post on Mobile Video and TV which should keep you going for a Monday morning.

ScreenDigest figures the prospects are bright for mobile TV and despite generating revenues of only €169 million in 2006, the researchers reckon that TV will overtake both music and gaming in the mobile content space by 2011 as operators focus on the mass-market for growth. Read the rest of the article for more detail (free subscription may be required to read the article).

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Research company Infonetics reckons there'll be 46m mobile TV subscribers by 2010 with the first spike in traffic being around the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008 and Asia Pacific taking the lead in mobile video uptake.

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IBM also writes what the IPTV and mobile TV advertising landscape might look like and is positive at the prospect of targeted ads to users.

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And talking of advertising, 118118 is planning a series of mobile clips of their iconic 1970s runner characters as part of their current viral marketing campaign. This is part of a wider refocus to create 118118 as a destination web and mobile site to include sports, entertainment and celebrity news. The company will also allow users to upload their own videos to the revamped portal (which doesn't seem to be live yet).

As it happens, you can already claim ringtones and wallpapers from 118118 by clicking on the mobile phone image on the home page or by going to www.118118.com from your mobile phone and scrolling to the end to '118118 ringtones'. The mobile site is slow to load and I'm unable to preview the ringtones. And it's not obvious which link to press to claim your ringtone and what's even worse, is that there's no handset or network operator recognition so you have to rely on extremely clunky dropdown menus in order to tell them what kind of phone you have. It's also rather thoughtless to have a 16kb logo for those folks who are paying per kilobyte. This is especially disappointing for a company purporting to be mobile friendly. Let's hope they get that fixed in the next iteration.

Mobile TV viewers are male, 18 to 34 and tech savvy

No big surprise there then! However, at a recent conference, Telephia claims there are 6.2m mobile TV subscribers in the US, 70% are males aged 18 to 34 and that Hispanics are three times more likely to subscribe to mobile video services. 80% of viewers watch for more than 5 minutes at a time. Also mobile video subscribers are more tech-savvy (well, they'd have to be wouldn't they to understand how to even get mobile video on their phones I reckon) and tend to use more mobile applications and two thirds are also using the mobile internet. I'm surprised that last figure isn't higher actually.

I don't know much about Mobile TV in the US but I'm wondering what it is they're actually watching... Anyone know or care to hazard a guess?

Via FierceMobile.

ROK apologises for not attending Swedish Beers... too busy raising lots of $$$

I had an email from Bruce at ROK (the mobile TV people) yesterday apologising for his absence from Swedish Beers but they've been rather busy raising a serious amount of cash ($7m) prior to floating the company later this year. This investment values the ROK Entertainment Group at $70 million. So I guess we can forgive him this time during this busy period! Just the once mind Bruce... we expect to see you next time!