MEOW! Mobile
Entertainment Opportunity Watch A monthly report with a personal touch from the world creative media capital of Los Angeles. Focus on pinpointing opportunities in the mobile media and entertainment area. Subscribe at: http://www.anttila.net |
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MEOW! Mobile Entertainment Opportunity Watch #4, 2002 October 6, 2002 MEOW is finally back after a summer-long 'incubation period' where I considered my options to work in the wireless industry going forward. The result is positive for MEOW and my amateur publishing career seems to continue into the foreseeable future. I am writing a report on the media industry wireless opportunities from the Hollywood perspective, commissioned by a larger market research entity (an announcement will follow shortly). Soon I will also be launching broader journalistic affiliations in the mobile entertainment area - stay tuned! On the business development consulting front, I have ventured into helping various media companies in their wireless strategies. I will profile some of those companies in the upcoming issues. Best regards, Tapio Anttila THE ERICSSON EPILOGUE: PART II Ericsson, well... sometimes we all make mistakes. I never imagined how little resistance there would be for the stock price to fall to current levels. In June my friends inside the company told me that the atmosphere in Stockholm is plagued by lack of motivation and poor direction from the management. So I canceled my buy order but ended up subscribing in the rights offering. According to investment bank sources, Ericsson is looking into filing for a chapter 11 which would give them some more time to reorganize. In any case, an aggressive reverse stock split seems inevitable. I think the management and the Wallenberg family are pretty much letting the stock come down on purpose (they've done this before) since Ericsson is not a takeover target - due to the tiered share structure. So I would put my new buy order in at 21 cents. Although I heard of a poll in Sweden according to which 41 percent of the citizens do not believe Ericsson will survive... What's suddenly wrong with the Swedes' infamous self-confidence? The company is clearly losing market position to Nokia on the infrastructure side but on the positive note Nortel, Alcatel and Lucent are suffering even more. Someone has to stay alive in the end when all of this is over and I still believe Ericsson will be among them. W-CDMA investments will probably be delayed even more and EDGE will get an enormous boost particularly in the US. To understand how all this will pan out, my readers should watch the Nokia 3G launch webcast - it tells the story of things to come - if you can bear the Finnish accent. Ericsson and others are just puppets in this game and they will end up adapting to the Nokia master plan. In my view Sony Ericsson is a lost cause and a victim of poorly executed reorganization where the samurais did not understand how to exploit the free spirit of the separatist vikings in Southern Sweden - Ericsson should sell their share before it will become totally worthless. I still believe in 3G (understood as W-CDMA), although is sometimes bears scary resemblance to the ISDN in the 80's... Nokia in their webcast is touting multitasking as the 3G differentiator - so did ISDN. Yet it can be a real differentiator in the hands of skilled marketers and product developers. On the 2.5G side, GPRS finally works well and will improve every day. CDMA2000 1XRTT has a lead on the market and will force a fast-track EDGE deployment by among others AT&T. The company is reportedly launching full nationwide availability of EDGE services with real handsets available by the end of 2003. (By that time Cingular will have hardly gotten their GPRS working nationwide...). The strength of EDGE is that the software upgrade from GPRS is fast and easy to deploy. No wonder we saw last week AT&T come out and downplay the role of W-CDMA in order to force more industry momentum behind EDGE. This will cause the Ericsson stock price to sink even more... Let's all hope the landscape gets bulldozed as soon as possible so that we all can get to work in a healthy oligopolistic environment. Rumors already abound: Nokia is reportedly discussing a 'merger' with Qualcomm (not kidding), SK Telecom say they are looking to set up US MVNOs but according to some the real target is the acquisition of Sprint PCS (market cap last week $1.8bn). The Nokia webcast: http://www.nokia.com/press/3g_event.html . THOUGHTS ON MOBILE CELEBRITY BRANDING Recently I have been in discussions with a number of people who either call themselves celebrities or are helping create celebrity 'brands'. They have an emerging interest to launch mobile services so we should try to understand the prerequisites to make that happen. Here's a few thoughts on the subject. 1) Expand the brand to be relevant in a mobile context. Anna Nicole Smith could be a great mobile brand. The former Playboy playmate and a widow of an 90-year-old oil millionaire has her own reality TV show which competes in tastelessness with televised dog fights between homeless people and other less sophisticated things American entertainment has to offer. But her brand has been carefully crafted to include multimedia elements such as a tune and a cartoon character. This obviously makes it that much easier to port into ring tones, mobile screensavers, MMS content, games etc. Unlike most brands, hers carries a 'meaning' that would allow her brand to cross over to other product categories and allow and 'interpretation' there. (Hey, this was branding theory, I'm not smoking anything here...) Other celebrities who might have mobile brand potential: Osbournes Family, Oprah Winfrey, Snoop Dogg and of course - The Simpsons.
2) Nomadic entertainment tools put you in touch with your audience - where ever you are. So you want to communicate with your fan base? Create a one-to-one relationship? Show more 'of yourself'? Then you and your promoters had better have the tools of expression at your disposal to do mobile storytelling from where ever you happen to be. This is exactly what the new camera phones enable - for the first time celebrities can publish stories 'from their pocket' and make money while doing so. This adds a real new element into the premium content service. 3) Mobile services enable communities. The best entertainer 'brands' take a life of their own in the hands of their fans and followers. I guess this is particularly clear in the case of the Osbournes Family. The audience communicates their own life through the language offered by the entertainer. This leads to the creation of new content (e.g. messaging) by the followers. However, at the same time the entertainer risks losing control of his/her brand (which has happened to Ozzy Osbourne numerous times over the years). Hey - how about publishing Ozzy's own T9 dictionary...? http://www.mtv.com/onair/osbournes/ - http://www.mtv.co.uk/theosbournes (compare the differences in the US and UK sites - the English are making the brand so much more dynamic... and see the mobile extensions in the game) 4) Creativity is key. Mobile entertainment is commoditized extremely fast. A good ring tone can be copied in an instance. The solution is 1) to develop a better ring tone and run away from the competition or 2) redefine the use of a ring tone and that way change the rules of competition (move from ring tones to music messaging, for example). In any case, only creativity will be able to command premium price. Listen to the ring tones below to appreciate what I mean.
PICKS FROM THE MOBILE HOLLYWOOD SCENE Santa Monica -based Starcut, a content aggregator company serving Nokia, is close to announcing deals with a number of major movie studios, to add to their existing cooperation with Universal and Fox. It also looks like Moviso is starting to work with Starcut on the US market as their distributor, a deal facilitated by their owner Vivendi-Universal. Starcut is licensing content and developing applications for mobile handset vendors and operators. Their main customer is Club Nokia which is very popular in Europe and will launch their services in the US by the end of the year. In the recent reorganization of Nokia Mobile Phones (NMP), Club Nokia became a profit/loss unit which MEOW believes will reduce their chances of becoming a serious player. Instead, Forum Nokia will increase its role through facilitating the developer-operator relationship. http://www.starcut.com/ On the BREW application side, Faith West Inc. has launched their ringtone offering under the brand Modtones on the Verizon network and its new GetItNow BREW offering. Faith is a Japanese company who developed the CMX software technology which enables the integration of graphics, LED illumination and vibrations into ringtones to enhance the experience. Its software solution competes with the hardware solution of Yamaha on the polyphonic ring tone side and with the emerging mobile Flash from Macromedia on the graphics side. Also Sprint PCS is shipping CMX in 80 percent of their new phones. www.faithwestinc.com www.modtones.com ActiveSky is working with FoxSports to deploy applications developed with the SMIL 2.0 compliant media publishing and delivery platform on the networks of Verizon, Sprint PCS and one yet to be announced (probably AT&T). Their graphics-rich solution clearly offers a whole new level of experience for those who ever tried WAP. The strategic goal for ActiveSky is to build a complete backend solution for mobile Java, similar to that of BREW by Qualcomm. Therefore it is one of the companies the strategic investment arm of Sun Microsystems is keeping a close eye on. www.activesky.com MusicNation, based in New York, is developing web presence for a number of artists and record labels. The company is about three months away from launching their wireless offering. http://www.musicvision.com/premier_sites_network.htm PICKS FROM THE WORLD MOBILE SCENE NTT DoCoMo is finding some innovative uses for its new video phone. Mr Nobuharo Ono, President of DoCoMo USA and my co-panelist at a recent USC seminar, said blind people are using video phones as their 'eyes' by walking with it and letting their support person to guide their way at a distance. I wonder whether the government will pick up the phone bill... EMAP in the UK launched a teenage gossip magazine called 'Sneak' which builds in SMS as an integral part of storytelling, polling the readership and targeted advertising. As an interesting detail, FlyText is providing a 'gossip engine' that automates the responses to teens' questions covering over 100 idols latest gossip. - MOBILE YOUTH * * * Disclaimer: Opinions presented herein are those of the undersigned and do not represent the position or message of any company I might be affiliated with. |
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