Of all the types of Video Content that piques consumers attentions, mobile news segments -- specifically local news content (headlines, weather, and traffic) would be most relevant to mobile consumers today. Perhaps this content would be even more relevant to frequent travelers, whose phones could access embedded positioning technologies to deliver this content seamlessly. Looking at it in another way, news is organically suited for on-the-go because most articles are already the right size for content-snacking and because their old-media counterparts were already consumed this way.
Of course, news can be delivered through video, audio, text or as web pages amenable to your mobile screen. Local traffic will be most conveniently delivered as audio in your car, while you may prefer to receive breaking news on political topics through video.
Unless your a library or museum, news has a short shelf-life, so any sort of a la carte offering will be of no interest to the regular consumer. This is not necessarily true for analyses, as any market research company will tell you, though as struggling newspapers move more and more into the area of expert analysis to keep their audiences, this will be an interesting space to watch as well. A recent article in CIO magazine reports that newspaper companies, in order to milk the ever-declining cash cow of old media, WSJ has promised more "analysis" in its paper product, while it shifts time-sensitive "breaking news" content to the Web, a more efficient distribution medium for updating real-time content.
Also interesting, is statistic that online revenues for the NY Times is still only 8%, despite its 12M New York Times unique readers in 2006.
So, if making money from online news is difficult, will monetizing mobile news also be as elusive? Again, this will be determined in large part by the Carriers. Content is easy to come by on the Open internet, but still limited in the Mobile internet due to limitations in Mobile browsing (data charge, performance and display issues).
What I wanted to brainstorm here was how News services would probably be offered to the consumer in a complementary manner at some point in the future. With the exception of the first, it will likely resemble the ways News is consumed today:
(a) News is pushed to the Idle Screen
The idle screen has been touted as the most valuable and under-utilized piece of real estate on the mobile phone right now. News "teasers" are broadcast to the phone's idle screen, and the user can push a button to view the relevant content (which may be in the form of text, audio or video) Cingular has been experimenting with this idea on certain Motorola phones enabled with Motorola live idle screen technology. Several European-based carriers such as Vodafone use technologies such as CellTick, who boasts superior CPM compared to delivering impressions over the TV or online.
(b) Headline or General news is consumed thru "Brand"-based subscription
The would be equivalent to going to your www.nytimes.com, or www.cnn.com. Consumers could subscribe to Fox News, CNN, CNBC, WSJ, New York Times, etc… It is still too early to tell if such a service will evolve into a purely free, advertising-based service, but a repeat of the "Ad-supported Free Content" versus "Walled Garden" debate in the online space may not necessarily be applicable on the Mobile space because of the oligopoly at the gates.
(c) More specific news is "managed" according to interest:
I want specific news about the Iraq War, about the New York Mets, about a particular Nasdaq stock. Management occurs thru a Mobile Content Management Application which captures the desired information and delivers it to the user. This could be achieved through full, active "Information Trapping" features, or through less active, personalization features (marking news that you "digg" and having a personalization engine push similar content to you).
Adoption rates for managed news applications are still low (5% of online users use RSS, according to Jupiter), but that number is set to grow as more and more people realize the advantage these applications offer.
(d) Specialized news can be accessed through a la carte or subscription News Search
As Mobile Search comes of age, we may see specialized news discovered through research-like activities. The online equivalent would be a Lexis-Nexis or Google search to detect articles on a subject the consumer would like to become more familiar with.
I'd love to hear any other ideas related to News on the mobile environment that could be added to this list. There's a lot of great ideas that international carriers have experimented with -- I may have missed a few of them. If so, let me know!
