'Stingy' telcos stifling mobile content provision

NEWS Anyone hoping to build a successful business by supplying content to mobiles is likely to have a tough time. A survey published today reveals that the mobile network operators are refusing to give these companies a decent revenue stream. Eighty-four per cent of businesses working in the UK mobile internet market feel the operators are not doing all they can to help third party content providers. Vodafone was the best of a bad lot, with 38 per cent of respondents listing them as the most supportive of the networks. Mobile content developers have long been lobbying the networks to adopt a business model similar to that embraced by Japan's NTT DoCoMo, whose i-mode service has 24 million subscribers, and is expected to generate $3.5bn in fiscal 2001. i-mode provides third party content providers with a convenient way to derive revenue. Users can pay subscriptions for a range of services using DoCoMo's unified billing platform for content providers. DoCoMo derives a nine per cent cut from content providers' revenues for this service. A full 92 per cent of survey respondents said that the implementation of a similar revenue model would "exert a positive influence on the development of compelling mobile data services in the UK". Takeshi Natsuno, a director of DoCoMo, which developed i-mode's successful content strategy, told delegates at a Motorola conference in Berlin recently: "We don't think i-mode is successful because of us. We know it is successful because of third party content providers. "The biggest threat to the success of i-mode is if [the company decides] to charge too much money from our content providers". Those content providers who have managed to strike deals with mobile networks have generally made one-off licencing deals with individual operators, without any element of revenue sharing. The survey covered the first 200 respondents to an email survey from the WapWednesday mobile internet forum.