While this is bad news for your early retirement plans, the iPhone may mark the Holy Grail for mobile media. The current scene is dubious at best: despite years of hype and hope, in 2006 less than 25 per cent of mobile users in the US used any form of mobile media, according to IDG. But Matthew Talbot, CEO of content provider Mobile 365, is convinced Apple will make a difference: “Without a doubt, the iPhone is a key of where the industry is going.”
But no one’s expecting mass sales overnight, not even Apple, which modestly estimates selling 10 million iPhones (one per cent of the US mobile market) this year.
As far as mobile content goes, iTunes distinguishes the iPhone from competitors such as Nokia and Motorola. While the iPhone will enter the market already backed by a wealth of enabled content, the established mobile companies took the opposite route by creating vendor-specific content after launching their phones.
Many telcos have tried but, to date, Motorola’s Motomusic is arguably the only digital platform showing any measurable success — and still, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan predicted that barely 20 per cent of all mobile music downloads last year derived from the mobile vendor; most were downloaded from a PC.
Apple’s iTunes, on the other hand, gives content owners a brand new target audience: the largely untapped ‘iPod generation’ who wouldn’t normally own a smartphone. To Talbot, such a wealthy category of new users is incentive in itself to provide more iTunes-enabled content. “Apple just needs to ask, ‘Why create your content for those other phones?’” he muses.
Clearly this is a rhetorical question for Andrew Hoppe, VP of digital media and programming strategy at MTV Networks Asia. He anticipates that the iPhone will encourage MTV-loving youths to the mobile medium: “The smartphone has always had the image of being a business/productivity tool,” he says.
“Apple has made this sexier by showing how you can create, manipulate and send photos, and consume audio and video media on-the-go — a much more attractive activity to the MTV audience.
“I think the iPhone will spur download of content through the Apple ecosystem, but perhaps not so much through other platforms such as Yahoo, MSN and other music stores.”
Meanwhile, Ricky Ow, general manager of SPE Networks Asia, doesn’t have any imminent plans to create Apple-specific content. In fact, he doesn’t even plan on buying the iPhone yet, because the 2G-enabled phone would be useless in, say, the 3G world of Japan.
Still, the former Apple salesman is convinced that the iPhone marks the beginning of a revolution. “The impact won’t be seen immediately,” he says. “This is just a sign that Apple has bigger things coming.”
