I've been watching this area closely for the last few weeks and it's interesting to see rapid investment and regeneration from the carriers in their wireless portal business, an area that was previously dying for them.

Colour screen, GPRS enabled phones preconfigured with WAP gateway settings are seeing the adoption of mobile internet usage in the UK almost without the userbase realising that's what they're doing.

How many MMS users, of the techno. savy early adopter majority today, actually know that when they receive their new MMS message it's more than likely delivered as an SMS message followed by a WAP call to download the content?

Vodafone are leading the way with Vodafone Live! and got a lot of good press over their new colour portal and now it looks that T-Mobile are joining suit. Rumour in the business has it that O2 are rapidly redesigning their portal in response to release within the next month and that Car Phone Warehouse are working on their MViva portal to compete as well.

Video downloads, mobile music and video messaging are all predicted to be great revenue streams for the carriers going forwards and the race to supply these services to your own, and other carrier customers is high.

The interesting opportunity lies in supplying the content to these providers, a position adopted today by brand owners such as MTV and EMap

Any thoughts as to who will win and why in this area?

Notes from Ovum below.

".. and an expansion of the T-Zone portal. This positions it well to compete directly with the widely publicised Vodafone Live! multimedia service. The T-Zone package is very similar to Live!, but a bit bigger (it includes video messaging, video downloads and mobile music) and a bit cheaper (MMS messages are 35p, compared with Vodafone's 36p). The company has teamed up with big media and entertainment names such as MTV Mobile and Universal Mobile to provide the services."

Alex

Founder
Skywire
Wireless Knowledge
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