German digital mobile-device expert Kai Rannenberg has claimed that mobile operators are likely to far better as intermediaries between professional content providers and the user than trying to be content providers themselves.
The mobile operator’s contribution to the value chain lies in its contact with its customer base, knowledge of their demographics and even their location from minute to minute and its status as a “trusted party” in the eyes of both customer and service provider, he says.
This is the core of the debate currently raging about the business model of mobile operators in regards to mobile content — should they be developers of content, aggregators, or merely pipes? While the latter is their core competency, many operators fear the commoditization of mobile data, leading to a high-volume low-profit scenario. There’s more to it than that — companies which wish to offer content-rich portals to their customers have concerns that content owners won’t license their content to the portals, leading to deals like SK Telecom buying a record label to ensure it has content.
Then there’s the third option, which is what Rannenberg favors: being a conduit. The i-mode service is a good example of this, where carriers provide a connection to 3rd parties for a small (well, smaller) cut of the profits. As Rannenberg indicates later in the article, people are more likely to pay for mobile content than for web content, so there’s more of a benefit to following the i-mode approach.
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