Should Content Companies Go Into Branded Mobile Phone Services?

Ross Levinsohn, SVP and GM at Fox Sports Interactive Media, created a stir (well, the room went silent) at a panel today on mobile video at Digital Hollywood. The point of contention: whether content/media companies should launch MVNOs (virtual cellphone companies piggybackig on leased infrastructure). Disney’s working towards launching MVNOs with, well, Disney content and ESPN. And whether this means that Disney won’t supply content to other carriers, or have restrictive terms if it does…
And his point of view, while not necessarily the prevailing line of thinking, does make sense:
“This is going to get me in trouble: well, Disney is half-pregnant: if you’re going to go do, you’ve to go do it. You can’t give MobiTV some content, and Cingular some content, and then expect people to pay. By the way, one man’s opinion, not speaking on behalf of Fox, if all of the premier content providers do that, then [they are killing revenues]. There’s no quicker way to kill a business than fragment it and make people choose. At the end of the day, the people who win will be players like MobiTV, who have aggregation of many. First of all, I wouldn’t want my brand to be associated as a phone company. It is like cable operators: you do a great job 99 days out of 100, and than one day you mess up, I’m ready to rip the cable out of the wall. It is a different business. Content companies are good content companies, and that’s what they should be.
We’re not in phone business…we, as a company, are 36% in satellite business, but that’s a distribution business. Personally, I think it is a big mistake…”
The Digital Hollywood Coverage is sponsored by Maven Networks

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