So, your mobile phone croons the opening bars of your favourite song every time it rings. Let's get one thing straight: that's kid stuff. On the other, hand you might be cucumber cool if you have downloaded the full song or if you are watching its music video on your mobile screen. How about watching the news channel on your phone? Or doing a web search?



The good old ring tones and SMS may dominate the mobile value added services, but there's clearly more to mobile content than just vanilla fare. Would you like to watch the short clips of the Miss World Contest? Yes, it's all happening in the mobile content space. The mobile is an anytime anywhere device today and the users are looking to do more than just voice communication. With over 2 billion GSM mobile users in the world, it is not surprising why operators are pushing mobile contents, encouraging users to spend more on the value added services.

With the launch of the visual radio, users can tune into a song with synchronised graphics on the mobile screen through the GPRS network. The idea is to spur content usage, so that, if you want to hear a song on your handset, you may be tempted to download its ring tone or even participate in a radio contest through your mobile phone.

If you are not carrying your iPod, don't worry, you have your mobile handset with you. You can tune in to your favourite song and even watch the music video, if you are so inclined. The market believes that the users were ready consuming full music and videos on their mobiles The entertainment too was conducive with the iPod becoming more popular and more of these phones are being introduced with richer sound capabilities. It is felt that music has been one of the biggest drivers of the mobile content. After all, look at the ring tone business.

The content market is growing by leaps and bound. Young Americans in the age group of 12 to 24 years are the most prolific down-loaders of ring tones, while a quarter of the U.S mobile phone owners have downloaded ring tones, which is a four-fold increase in the past one year. According to a report, 86% of video gamers own a mobile phone and 48% of these individuals play games in their mobile devices. With the advanced technology of mobile phones, there is a continuous demand for multi-functional video games with improved graphics. The pace at which the users are adopting content is accelerating very rapidly. Improvement on handset and network capabilities is pushing content usage to a great extent. More-over, handset costs are rapidly falling and hence becoming more affordable. According to statistics available, on average, amongst the 60% who downloaded ring tomes, 33% downloaded two or more and a more than a third of them, downloaded three or four ring tomes in one month.

The following is a set of figures of interest ?

Content that mobile phone users expect to be accessing in 12 month's time

Asia PacificEuropeNorth AmericaSouth America

(%)(%)(%)(%)

Games49151130

Ring Tones73202725

News55151328

Music31151523

Sports Clips29121013

Multimedia Images (images, screen savers)56161313

Video clips or movie previews257710

Full feature films11838

Source

Logica/CMG, May/June 2005. Survey of 1,000 adulta in each territory

covering Europe Germany, Italy & UK), Asia-Pacific (Thailand),

South America (Brazil) and North America (USA)

With the ring tones and full music downloades rising, the operators are hoping to see a boom in video downloads. It is believed that the next inflection point for mobile content will be video streaming. This is where the third generation (3G) mobile comes in. It is the question of network compatability. Television junkies crave for highlights of the latest game on or a rundown of their favourite TV shows. This is becoming another content feature of the mobile phone. It is the next hype coming in vogue and will be the next big money-maker for mobile phone operators. This service has already gained popularity in Asia and Europe, with the U.S. operators gearing up to come into the game with services of their own.

Streaming video runs on real-time and that is how it differs from other contents, which are just online features. Since it is on real-time, it requires a very small buffer on mobile terminals. In case of the other contents, it is first transferred into the mobile handset, after which it can be viewed, or played back. In case of the streaming video, it starts playing as soon as the download is started. In such cases, a totally new concept of network has been designed, with quality and robustness of the streaming server, where the network performance becomes vital. A compelling factor to many mobile users is to access streaming media archives of news and sports content.

The development of mobile streaming media services is being seen as a direct function of the so called 'generations' of technology. Through the years in 1980s, the fist generation mobile network, the 1G, was an analog system, designed to carry only voice and voice call signalling. The operation is unlike internet, which is essentially a shared resource, while, the then mobile network architecture was circuit-switched, open for the duration of the call, similar to the public fixed line network. In such a switched network, the two parties are the exclusive users of the particular connection. On hanging up, the call path is switched off and the network resources, viz., the connection and the switch ports, were free to be allocated to the next incoming user.

The second generation (2G) came into use in the 1990s. These are digital network but still followed circuit switching principle and this one too carried voice and voice call signalling. Later, data services were deployed over the 2G network but the circuit switching principle was still being used at a bit rate of just 14.2 kbps, similar to the earlier modems over the traditional fixed line telephone network. Video streaming, along with other less demanding data communication, like, Internet access, email, or data downloads, languished behind mobile network operators' targets, for the inherent low data communication bandwidth available and the circuit switched architecture of the 2G network.

During the years 1998 and 2002, the architecture of the network changed with much demand for all kinds of data communication over mobile phones and mobile PCMCIA cards. The operators upgraded their network to what is known as 2.5G technology. The circuit switching principle was changed to a purely IP-based technology, when the opportunity of a faster rate in data commuication became possible. Not only that, the network integrated nicely with the internet, the increased bandwidth brought in the ideas what we see emerging today.

The present 2.5G network technology is what is called Global System for Mobile communications-General Packet Radio Service (GSM-GPRS). In theory GPRS is capable of just over 100kbps, but in general it delivers 30kbps. A much more advanced third generation network (3G) has come into operation at some parts of the world, with a promised capability of 384Kbps to 1Mbps, while the 2,5G network is proving to be more than adequate to deliver video streaming and messaging, largely by using the extensions of current internet streaming media technology.

But a question does arise in mind - is the 2.5G enough to stand up to the strain when millions and then billions of users start watching TV on their mobile phones? We have the 3G ofcourse

Prabir Sen, M.Sc Engg (London)

prabirsenuk@yahoo.co.uk