The acceptance that it’s the consumer that decides on the success of a mobile service hit home with the industry’s value chain at Wednesday morning’s keynote session focused on mobile entertainment. Instead of replaying the familiar ‘content is king’ phrase, the mood was strongly in favour of satisfying mobile users’ varied requirements.
A telling comment from Dr Youngcho Chi, Samsung Mobile’s Senior VP of Overseas Marketing, was for handsets to stop being a bottleneck and become devices that consumers can use to easily access music, games and video content. “We must create a user experience that generates maximum usage, with handset vendors acting as the integrator to ensure the platform is tuned to the optimum. We’re pushing the industry to accept a common entertainment user interface to remove any restrictions on third party applications.”
Building on this theme was Todd Miller, VP and MD of Sony TV’s Asia business. “Everything we do now is with the consumer in mind. We’ve learnt some very valuable lessons involved with making mobile TV a success. In brief, we need to recreate the traditional TV experience but keep the navigation and pricing as simple as possible.” Dr Li Zhengmao, Executive Director and VP for China Unicom, was also keen to stress the needs of the consumer when launching new services. “Music is a major focus for a Value Added Service and is proving very popular with our customers. However, we need better handsets to support entertainment services that are quickly becoming available.”