Synopsis
Business models remain shaky for content providers utilising the mobile operators’ portals, with operators still taking a significant proportion of total revenues. However as consumers move to tariffs which include mobile data caps, customers will tend to use services provided outside the network operators portal. The same phenomenon affected the computer based internet. In the very early stages of the internet’s growth portal based traffic was the norm. However this very quickly changed as users migrated to services provided independently by other service providers. The same process is now underway in Australia with respect to the mobile internet. However mobile operators earned significant revenue from the first generation of mobile media services such as ringtones and wallpaper. Though these revenues are not growing at a similar pace there are significant opportunities for mobile operators and other firms to provide new popular and revenue generating services. However the mobile operators fear losing their ability to share revenues with content providers while simultaneously being forced to invest heavily in improvements to the network that are required to support future services. This report discusses the use of mobile media services in Australia in four broad categories; text and messaging based media such as mobile email, twitter and voting, audio based media such as ring tones and mobile music, video based media such as mobile TV and picture based media such as photo sharing and wall papers.