Be Careful What You Wish For

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Now, music and photos on phones are not exactly what you’d call new territory, but as services they are both very interesting from a revenue, market and power point of view.

Where photos are concerned, how do you get hardcopies of your snaps? I’ve already stated the obvious here - via Bluetooth or your PC to your own photo printer, or through a bureau that can cope with digital images, either in the high street or online.

Kodak seems very keen on partnerships with mobile operators, and has a suite of storage, sharing and printing services that it offers in conjunction with O2, and another due to start for T-Mobile customers in April this year.

Where tunes are concerned, you can copy your own music across to a phone if you have the means to do so, and it has the memory and playing capability. But what operators want, no doubt, is for you to download tunes direct to a phone.

That’s OK unless digital rights management comes into play. I am used to converting my music to a digital format then listening to it from whatever device suits at the time. I am most certainly not going to pay for tracks that are tied to a device or devices.

These two features are great examples of the ways in which mobile phone developments are pushing towards increasing revenues for network operators. Who is going to broker over the air photo printing and who is going to sell you music tracks? Is there money in either of these for your network operator? (Clue – the answer to the last question is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and it’s unlikely to be ‘no’.)

The crucial question all this raises for me is how much the market is being driven by revenue generation, and how much by popular demand.

Let’s digress. Consider the following:

‘You can have any colour you want - red, yellow or green.’

‘But I want blue.’

‘Er, did we say blue was a colour?’

Hard drives in phones look set to help them become mass storage devices, increases in data speeds will help with the transfer of ever lager files more quickly, and as operators fight for our custom their prices may have to fall (the forthcoming 3G Wars should be especially interesting in this respect). But network operators have to make money somehow.

Revenue, markets and power.

Podcasting is completely anarchic. You don’t need a great deal of tech savvy to create a podcast, or to obtain and use one. Once you’ve downloaded a podcast it can be played as many times as you like on any device supporting its format.

Visit www.ipodder.org to make your first foray into this totally absorbing world. And don’t think you need an iPod – the word ‘podcasting’ might indicate that you do, but anything that’ll play MP3s and has a few MB of memory going spare should be fine.

Today podcasts are largely made available by and used by enthusiasts. Music downloads are also used by enthusiasts, and some are made available by enthusiasts, but corporations are the ones already in control of production and distribution, and likely to be almost exclusively in control in the future. There are free music downloads to be had, and there is effort being put into finding ways to ‘monetarise’ podcasting, but the free vs fee model is widespread enough to stand up here.

Revenue, power and markets are about what the market will bear. In the world of mobile phones and services you and I are the market. What services are we prepared to pay for, and how much cash will we part with, and what are we prepared to give up?

Will you order photographic prints direct from your phone? Will you pay for music even if it is tied to a device? Can podcasting remain happily anarchic? What’s going to happen to ‘blue’?

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