Mobile services including music, movie clips and mobile TV services will create a market for digital content worth £1.14 billion by 2010. The market will grow three-fold from £380 million in 2005 as the rise of 3G mobile will spur consumer spending on mobile services, according to a report from PayPal and Datamonitor.
In 2005, ringtones, realtones and screensavers accounted for around two-thirds of mobile content spend, with games accounting for the majority of remaining revenues.
However, full-track music will account for an increasing proportion of content spending – UK consumers will spend over £200 million on mobile music in 2010. Video downloads will also increase in popularity, accounting for around 11% of mobile content spend within the next 4 years, the report found
Carl-Olav Scheible, General Manager, UK Merchant Services for PayPal Europe, said: “Mobile content is already the biggest digital content market in the UK and is one that is going to see even greater growth in the coming five years.
“As new wave services such as wirelessly-delivered music files, movie clips and mobile TV are delivered to handsets, the levels of spend are likely to be spurred once again.
“The challenge will be in creating payment mechanism that means businesses can monetise their content without being entirely beholden to the mobile networks.”
Of course, he means businesses should be considering a system like PayPal. The mobile networks would add they are developing third party and off-portal payment mechanisms already, although efforts to create a standardised approach through SimPay ended in failure in 2005.