Peter White from Faultline is rather vehemently not buying into predictions that mobile music and mobile games will be gigantic industries in a few years. I think he makes the mistake of comparing future predictions to current volumes, for example quoting Screen Digest as predicting the download market for mobile phone games will be worth $6.4 billion by 2010 – about 30% of the current total games market of around $20 billion. But Screen Digest has put the growth of the total games market at 30% in 2003, and if that continues $6.4 billion will look like spare change.
However, White makes some excellent points about downloading music and digital rights management, claiming that once the software on mobiles becomes standardized people will transfer music from the PCs rather than paying three times as much to download it. “If a PC is needed to keep SOME of the record collection, then it will need easy ways in and out of the phone. It should be as easy to update your phone as updating your iPod, and the music should be priced in much the same way as Apple’s iTunes is today. If it’s not, then people would rather have an MP3 player AND a phone.” A good read for an anti-hype point of view.
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