Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Big Barriers to the Adoption of Mobile Value-Added Services.

Survey Findings Illustrate Patchy Interest in Many Services and Concerns About Pricing and Service Delivery Yankee: A comprehensive examination of European mobile multimedia trends providing valuable insight into current consumer behavior. Some of the major highlights include:

• User demand for mobile TV is modest. Only 11% of respondents said they are very interested in the service. Once confronted with the reality of how much the TV service is likely to cost (i.e., €15 or US $19 per month), 85% of respondents said they are less interested in the service.

Full-track music downloads continue to dominate the headlines, while in reality user interest remains low. Only 5% of respondents are prepared to pay more than a 20% premium for full-track downloads. However, the typical premium today is 100%. Alternative music-related services are more interesting to the user and more likely to generate revenue in the short term.

• The industry must do more to convince users that browsing and downloading is safe and affordable. Almost 40% of respondents said fears over price dissuade them from downloading more ringtones.

However, mobile operators are overcoming the technical barriers to delivering many of their services. Picture messaging—which in the past was dogged by unreliability and poor ease-of-use—seems to have solved those problems. Respondents’ main barriers to using picture messaging are price and no need to send picture.

2006 European Mobile Multimedia Survey Publ 20060612