[Notes from the 2006 Digital Media Conference]
Paul Towler: Mobile is an incredibly flexible distribution mechanism, but one of the key challenges that all the MVNOs have is that they don't own their own infrastructure, so they're forced to live at the whim of the mother network. To that degree on the data side, they're not in full control. The key attributes of a successful MVNO (Virgin Mobile comes to mind) is that they capitalize on their marketing ability instead of their segmentation capabilities. Being consumer-oriented can also carry over to this space...
Vince Shaw: You really have to educate the customer and this is a market challenge. eBay could potentially roll out a wireless device oriented towards making money off of non-talk uses...becasue of all the loyal customers...Believe it or not, John Deer has a pretty loyal community as well. Location based services offer tremendous opportunity too...the surface of that hasn't even been scratched. The technology always outpaces the business models...
Key Sar: Wi-Max is a threat to carriers as it eventually surpasses the 5-10 city block range. It's certainly something that we're looking at...But, one of the problems is that there's a lack of OEM in the devices...Building a Network is very expensive...ours cost us 30 billion dollars...
Alan Reiter: If you're thinking of getting into this business, you need to look at every single piece of your value chain. In wireless, if one of those links is missing it can really trip you up. At this point in time, ESPN and Disney are looking the like the best MVNO's for the longterm...Helio is probably 3rd...but needs to tweak their pricing...and AMP'd mobile is 4th, chasing the young adults - but their pricing is too high. In this fast moving business, "don't look at what's happening today - look at what's going to happen in the next 2 years." Also, think about the business processes...Very very soon, video-enabled phones are going to have a huge impact on user-generated sites like Youtube. (Camcorders aren't really going to be the dominant content source anymore.)
Jeff Lee: Text messaging is pretty easy to launch and is an easy way to get into the space; from there you can easily branch out. Don't agonize over the myriad of choices, but definitely start something. I agree with Alan's rankings. AMP is an anchor in this category, while Helio/SK telecom is heavily committed. 25% of our users have played a game on their handset, but when you look at downloading a brew/java application - that's quite a bit more complex, so you have to make these things easy...in order to become explosive.
No comments:
Post a Comment