Video, and Video Business Models, Now Shape Mobile Bandwidth and Business Models

At least three reinforcing trends drive the mobile data business, and supplier strategies to deal with mobile data supply. First, exponential consumption, with mobile data consumption growing by about a factor of six over the next five years or so. Second, Mobile data consumption is driven by entertainment video. Third, content consumption overall now increasingly is happening on mobile screens.

Taken together, all those trends, in advance of wider widespread mobile streaming consumption, mean suppliers need to dramatically increase access bandwidth, but also do so within the context of sustainable business models.

Increasingly, that means ways to offload or direct consumption off the “mobile” infrastructure and onto an “untethered” mechanism of one sort or another. Up to this point, such offload has used Wi-Fi. In the future, more of the load will be shifted to small cells, where users in dense areas are consuming content on a mobile device, but in a stationary context.

In 2016, for the first time, adults in the United Kingdom, for example, will spend more time with their mobile devices than with desktop and laptop computers, eMarketer projects. In 2016, mobile time—which includes non-voice time with tablets and mobile phones—will account for more than a quarter of daily media time for the average adult, at 2 hours and 29 minutes.

By 2018, mobile will have a 29.5 percent share of total media time spent per day, just a single percentage point behind TV.

There are other notable changes in business context as well. “Mobility” now is partly about communications (voice, messaging, chat, photo sharing, social media) but also about content consumption, and a shift from physical to virtual, large screens to smaller and small screens, linear to on-demand.

It sometimes is not appreciated, but rating mechanisms essential to “free media” or media subscription businesses hinge on zero rating. That makes continuing battles over the application of what some see as “network neutrality” rules are important. Without zero rating, the media subscription business--especially video subscriptions--will not be workable.

source: Market Realist

source: Market Realist