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Year in Review

2006 was the year in entertainment. The Tom Cruise–Katie Holmes wedding was prime time news. Britney Spears’ divorce from K-Fed graced the covers of major daily newspapers. The arrival of Shiloh Nouvel, daughter of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, captured headlines around the world. And that’s just the tip of the celebrity entertainment iceberg.

For the first time, tech coverage was also driven primarily by interest in entertainment. Verizon launched its V-Cast music service and announced its intentions to make YouTube mobile, while Comcast and Time Warner began offering their television services via Sprint mobile phones. LG’s Chocolate phone made mobile music come alive, while Cingular “upped the ante” with its BlackJack, a smartphone from Samsung designed to handle music, videos and games in addition to e-mail and the usual business applications.

What does this mean? Simply stated, mobile music hit a high note in 2006, signaling a change in the industry. And while we saw carriers and OEMs at last began to deliver on the promise of mobile entertainment over the course of the year, new research predicts mobile content use will truly explode in 2007 and that we’ll see mobile games and television episodes pull away from the current mobile favorite, music.

Executive Summary

2006 was the year of mobile entertainment, according to findings from Context Analytics. Significant acquisitions and service launches around advanced mobile content offerings resulted in peaks of coverage in business and wireless trade press alike. Advancements in wireless technology drove discussions around the evolution of the mobile device as the “third screen,” behind the television and PC, and furthered momentum for network providers to offer a “quadruple play” of bundled services for subscribers.

On the Minds of Consumers

Sprint’s cable joint venture, Verizon’s aggressive launch into mobile music and mobile entertainment acquisitions such as the EA/Jamdat and RealNetworks/WiderThan deals had the media—particularly the business press—focusing on the business drivers and opportunities behind mobile entertainment. Specifically, applications like messaging, streaming video, music, location-based services, mobile marketing/advertising and gaming created the biggest buzz.

Best practices in marketing these advanced services also emerged as a hot topic in 2006 for the wireless media, especially given the vastly disparate adoption of mobile services among age groups. Teens continued to prove strong users of mobile messaging and music applications such as ringtones and ringbacks, where by comparison women in their 40’s redefined the face of the typical mobile casual gamer.

An Enterprising Perspective

The impact of mobile content was also felt on the enterprise front. The steady adoption of smart devices resulted in new challenges, including rising threats of mobile viruses and spam, as well as a sharp increase in e-mail and content traffic. Discussions around RFID innovations and service launches centered largely on the vertical markets such as health care, automotive and retail, with many pieces highlighting success stories and ROI analysis.

On the network technology front, much coverage last year centered on the deployment of municipal Wi-Fi networks across the country, as well as the viability of WiMAX and advanced dual-mode devices. With more advanced content and services being developed and deployed, carriers and network operators have had to rapidly expand their networks’ availability and bandwidth to accommodate the growing demand from subscribers. Wireless trade media paid particularly close attention to the correlation of network advancement to the rise of mobile content applications such as messaging, music and video. The industry is speculating on which network technology providers will survive—and capitalize on—this momentum by offering the most viable business model.

Dollars and “Sense”

When it came to stories about wireless plan pricing and network coverage, most attention centered on mobile carriers, who were featured in 71 percent of stories. It’s no surprise that customer service continues to be a sore spot for wireless consumers, however only 2 percent of coverage in business/trade press focused on this topic. Spikes in coverage around pricing specifically centered on announcements such as Verizon’s lowered contract termination fees, as well as debates on municipal Wi-Fi costs.

So What?

These findings and analysis clearly demonstrate the momentum around mobile content and entertainment, but with an increasingly crowded and constantly shifting playing field, companies need compelling and insightful strategies to stay competitive. PR practitioners require a comprehensive understanding of the wireless landscape in order to develop a strong presence and gain a thought leadership position within the broader wireless ecosystem.

At Text 100 we believe media research should provide clients with a competitive edge in the media environment. And while this report shows that there are broad trends in media coverage, it also demonstrates that these trends are comprised of smaller topical discussions that PR practitioners can manage strategically to enhance the sales, share price and reputations of the companies with which they work.

* Chart One: shows the number of articles mentioning Mobile Entertainment (Video/TV, Audio/Music, Gaming and Betting/Gambling)versus Price and Coverage (Cost/Price of Plans and Service Level/Coverage) discussions between October 2001 and September 2006. Data were drawn from Factiva's database of over 10,000 news sources worldwide.

* Chart Two: shows how often Content and Services (Video/TV, Audio/Music, Messaging, Location-Aware Services, Ringtones/Ringbacks, Gaming, Mobile Marketing/Advertising and Betting/Gambling), Network Technologies (Wi-Fi, WiMAX and FMC), B2B (Smart Devices, RFID and Security) and Price and Coverage (Price/Cost of Plans and Service Level/Coverage) discussions were mentioned in Business versus Trade publications. Data were drawn from over 10,000 news sources worldwide between October '05 and September '06.