Indian Mobile entertainment to touch $ 5 Billion

NEW DELHI: Mobile entertainment is set to become a five billion dollar business industry in India in the next two years as mentioned by telecom experts.

"The Value added services market in India is growing very rapidly. Industry should add more innovations in this area to cater to its demands," BSNL Director Finance S D Saxena said at the second international conference on Value Added Services (VAS).

VAS is expected to become a major revenue earning services for the telecom industry, he said adding, for new innovations operators and content providers could look into the possibility of "Cultural marketing", which includes providing matrimonial service, religious chants among others on mobile phones.

DoT Member, Services, Arun Kumar Saxena said the department is keen to encourage VAS, like mobile TV and 3G services, which has huge demand across the country specially in rural areas.

"The major opportunity exists in development of applications for mobile phones on a large scale. Qualcomm is providing laboratory facilities for small Indian developers to work on developing such applications on BREW platform of CDMA technology," Qualcomm President India and SAARC Kanwalinder Singh said.

He also commented that contextual applications would become the next big thing in VAS, where advertisers could project their message in an entertainment video at the right moment to gain maximum impact on the consumer.

Addressing `VAS India 2006` in the capital, Singh said that value added services (VAS) are providing 10% of the total revenues for telecom operators at present but the growth is expected to be 20 to 30% per annum.

Mentioning that demand for VAS was growing in India at 60% per annum, Arvind Rao, CEO, Onmobile indicated demand in ring-back tone alone was over 8 to 9 million everyday. Over 20 million people were using multi-media services. VAS demand would go up further as local languages begin to be used, he said.

Advertisers are now planning to project their message in an entertainment video to gain maximum impact on the consumer through mobiles. The advertisement will be in a scroll, WAP and voice based format and it will be sent only to select mobile users.

The service, called Opt-in service, will be provided by the mobile operator under which the operator will scrutinise the users based on their choice of downloads such as astrology, cricket, songs, matrimonials and finance.

The user will then be sent a contest form and from the choice of answers, the subscriber can be known. The contest will contain 5-6 questions based on the download.

Factors such as phone bills and roaming pattern will also be considered by the company. The companies assume that nearly six million users will opt for the service initially and the number will increase gradually.

The companies are expecting to earn a revenue of $ 45 million from the service and it is expected to roll-out in 3-4 months. The global mobile phone industry provides revenue of $ 585 billion from value added services.