"Managed Mobile Content Simplified"- A Feature by Teleglobe

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If the rage for ringtones has taught mobile operators anything, it's that the mobile phone is much more than a utilitarian device. The mobile phone connects you, entertains you, even personifies you, in a way that landline phones never have. What this represents for mobile marketers is a golden opportunity. It means that users want content that goes way beyond ringtones and the odd weather forecast: they want streaming video, MP3s, ringback tones, 3D games—anything that quenches their thirst for media to go. And they don't just want quantity and choice; they want quality. As handsets evolve, users' expectations evolve with them: games are expected to be more like what you would see on a computer or a console; music is expected to sound good.

But mobile operators are already waging operational wars on so many fronts. The network alone is a massive undertaking, marketing in the mobile space requires being as slick as they come, and the lifecycle of the current content products our industry sells is spectacularly short. Add increasingly more sophisticated and diverse mobile content types to the mix, and well, that's a lot of balls for mobile operators to keep in the air.

The Challenge Chain

Implementing or upgrading a mobile content offer is quite a string of challenges. One of the issues for operators is identifying the hot content providers who have something that will turn their subscribers' heads. Once identified, they need to negotiate an agreement with the providers, sign them on, and manage them as partners. Depending on the breadth of content offered, they may have to do this some 50 times over with different content providers. Then from each of those 50 partners, operators need to select all the content that they want to deliver to their customers, agree on pricing and promotions, and test each piece of offered content for every handset supported .

Next there's designing and managing storefront interfaces, ones that subscribers will enjoy using and that won't slow them down. That involves both Web and mobile interfaces, which generally requires two distinct sets of skills. Of course, like any other store, success depends on sharply executed merchandising and promotion, providing the exactly right “fresh” offers to each of several customer segments— ideally individually targeting each individual shopper with what they will want to buy.

And not to be forgotten, there's the money side of the venture, reporting, and after-sales support. Accurate billing is critical, as is being able to accurately answer customers' questions as soon as they arise. Oh yeah—then there is the requirement to rapidly and accurately settle with those 50 anxious partners, making sure that each is paid for only what the customer has accepted and at the same time, making sure there is no basis for disputes. Credits? Yes, there are credits. Part of doing content business.

In the time that it takes to plot each of these tasks on a project management spreadsheet, the competition could very well be delivering the latest Britney Spears air or 3D road race to your former customers. Did I mention that time-to-market is an issue too?

If this seems overwhelming, it's because it is. For mobile operators, there are many, many elements involved in getting mobile content off the ground, elements that require different skills, different players, and thus potentially major stress for almost every part of the company: marketing, operations, network, development, finance, customer service, and legal, even though only marketing will “make a difference” versus competition.

Innovative mobile content providers have some major hurdles on the way to market as well. They are often small fish in a great big pond, trying to get the attention of behemoths of the industry so that they can monetize their content. Just getting heard, let alone negotiating with mobile operators, is a major feat. Instead of whacking their way through the underbrush of the industry jungle, mobile content providers would do well to find themselves a global distribution channel that's clear of obstacles.

And then there are owners of high-profile brands who want to exploit their brands in the mobile content space, but who aren't necessarily in the mobile content game. They need to be able to plug in to a platform to get their brand working for them over the mobile networks.

A Unified Approach

Luckily, there is a unified approach for mobile carriers to easily manage downloadable and streaming content from any number of vendors, and for mobile content providers to get a ready audience with the mobile carriers. Outsourcing to a mobile content solution provider addresses both groups' challenges and is the bridge between both sets of interests. Managed solution providers bring the mobile operator market to the doorstep of mobile content providers. But even more significantly, they offer carriers an end-to-end solution for delivering the latest, the hottest mobile content, a solution that can include supply chain management, storefront and purchase management, through to billing, settlement, reporting, and customer care, with no major capital outlay or development effort - a solution that lets carriers focus their energies on marketing, merchandising, and promotion, on delighting customers .

A to Z, soup to nuts, however you want to describe managed content solutions, they save mobile carriers precious time and resources, while bringing hot content to their subscribers, yesterday. Can you say ARPU?

Plus, a provider of managed mobile content solutions offers value-added functionality that is becoming increasingly important to both the carriers and subscribers, functionality that carriers going it alone might not have the wherewithal to develop. Some examples are control mechanisms for parents who want to limit the kind and amount of content their kids use, or tools to manage purchase limits set by the carriers themselves.

There are also segmentation tools that allow carriers to gear their offer to specific subscriber segments. These tools could mean that the businesswoman who is always on the road won't have to wade through 3D games or celebrity gossip to find the exchange rates or international weather forecasts she is looking for. And based on usage patterns, the carrier would know that when they launch their new multimedia stock watch, she just might be interested.

And what about digital rights management? That's a whole piece of the puzzle that most carriers aren't equipped to deal with today. But a mobile content managed solution providers is. Their solution can wrap a digital rights envelope around a song or ringtone, for instance, to prevent it from being passed around by users who, as the music industry well knows, were brought up to know how to share. Or they can let it be shared enough to spread it, but just not too much to not get paid. Or they could give users a free trial period for a downloaded game, after which the user has to purchase the game to go on to the next level. Digital rights management ensures that legitimate sources of content get their legitimate due.

Going with a managed solution also safeguards against being left behind with a platform that can't keep up with new technologies and content. It future-proofs your content offer, because a mobile content solution provider will be ramping up for what's next while it's still just a gleam in the early adopter's eye.

What's clear from what we've seen in the industry in past years is that mobile time could well be leaving Internet time in the dust. The time-to-market imperative carriers face when it comes to mobile content is not going away. In this environment, the best strategy is to focus on the content market, not on the content infrastructure, so that you can keep feeding subscribers compelling content as it hits the market, through a rich, streamlined user experience. Because let's face it, subscribers don't think in terms of infrastructure, and they don't give a hoot about what goes on behind the scenes. What they want is the latest content and the best user experience available on the market today.


 

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