Telcos Believe Launching New Mobile Content Should Take Less Than a Month

A survey commissioned by Valista and conducted at the Building Blocks 2008 conference held last week found that over 86 percent of the industry insiders interviewed believe that it should take less than a month to launch new mobile content and services with an operator. This expectation is far from reality, as 80 percent of respondents stated that it actually takes between 3 and 9 months to introduce new mobile content and services.

"ItÃ's clear that the mobile industry is looking for more streamlined ways to on-board and manage content and services," said Fran Heeran, CTO of Valista. "It can typically take months to introduce new mobile content and services across all the carriers. This clearly needs to change as content and services lose relevancy with each passing month and some content is never considered because of the production time. Mobile service and content providers need to be able to react to the market quickly and provision new mobile content and services in a more dynamic fashion."

The Valista survey also found that the mobile industry is not taking advantage of customer loyalty programs as a way to encourage consumers to buy more downloaded content. Surprisingly, none of the respondents said that they use any form of loyalty scheme as an incentive to increase content purchasing or encourage repeat buyers. Over 70 percent of those surveyed, however, use other promotion methods to entice customers to purchase more content and services, including discounts, free trials and product bundling.

The survey confirmed an increasing preference for putting charges on the mobile bill. Over three quarters of respondents believe that mobile customers today pay for content and services through their monthly bill, with nine percent believing credit and debit cards are still widely used. Only seven percent of those surveyed believe that Premium SMS is still the primary mode of payment for mobile content purchases.

Conversely, over 78 percent of participants said that broadband customers today still use credit/debit cards and Paypal to pay for digital content and services. This figure shows that the market is still largely dependent on the use of credit/debit cards for broadband content and service purchases with less than a quarter of respondents believing the monthly bill and ad-support are other methods used to acquire content and services in the broadband channel.

Most respondents predicted that access to online entertainment, such as videos, movies and music, will be the most popular value-added service over the broadband channel. Twenty-one percent believe that technical support will be common, followed by anti-virus protection with six percent and security products with three percent.

Regarding which channel will experience the highest growth for content purchases in the next two years, respondents were split almost evenly with 51 percent believing in the broadband/cable channel and 48 percent predicting mobile.

The survey also asked industry insiders regarding their views on payments via Near Field Communications (NFC). Those polled remain sceptical about NFC becoming a reality with more than half of the respondents stating it will take over 5 years for contactless mobile payments to be widely used. This is consistent with a recent report by Juniper Research stating that the NFC mobile wallet devices will remain limited in the next couple of years except in the Far East - particularly in Japan where it is already widely used. The Juniper Research report predicts that by 2013, one in five phones will have NFC.

Building Blocks 2008, held at the Marriott San Jose Hotel, was jointly organised by Digital Hollywood and the Consumer Electronics Association, producer of CES, the largest trade show in the U.S. Attendees included executives from the mobile, broadband, social media, communications and entertainment industries, in addition to press and industry analysts.

Posted to the site on 12th August 2008