Outside of North America, mobile entertainment is commonplace among a vast throng of the young and mobile...but why do Europe and Japan lead the way? Is it just lagging technology or a combination of cultural and geographical marketplace disparities? Are the hardware and network limitations or barriers insurmountable? WBT's David Geer investigates, and speaks to sundry U.S. software developers who are jumping on the m-entertainment bandwagon right now even though its arrival still seems to them to be 18­24 months away.

All right, who wants fresh, hot mobile entertainment? Who's offering it? Where can you get it? How much does it cost? Is it worth it? If you're part of the market these companies are targeting, you already understand its value or will, as soon as you get your hands on it. In fact, we're talking about products already proven in many parts of the world where mobile entertainment is commonplace among a vast throng of the young and mobile.

While both Japan and Europe have vast arrays of mobile entertainment formats and delivery devices at their disposal, the one identifiable culprit that's holding us back here in the U.S. is our limited technology.

There's no question of whether the technology exists, whether it works, whether it has market appeal, or whether it turns a dollar. The answer has been a loud and definite "yes!" in much of the rest of the world. There seems to be no question from the developers to the carriers to the platform providers whether it will be equally successful here. The only question seems to be, "when?"

America's youth have long since accepted cell phones and handheld games as separate entities. Can you imagine these hungry, young minds rejecting the marriage of the two into one? Neither can we.

Who Are the Customers for Mobile Entertainment?
Who are these young minds? "We're talking about the target demographic of 18­26 year olds that we've identified," says Paul Hughes, COO of Sonera Zed. "The things that are important to this age group oddly haven't changed much over time. They're the social aspects, meeting friends, as well as their music and, finally, entertainment in terms of games they might like to play."

Sonera Zed is a highly successful, mobile entertainment provider. Sporting a broad array of offerings, Zed's COO was proud to announce the launch of their wireless entertainment network through AT&T Wireless services. Sonera Zed (www.zed.com) is making some 56 mobile entertainment attractions available via AT&T. Under the headings of the entertainment, community, and information categories, Zed has a compliment of content (ringtones and graphics available separately). Under entertainment you'll find horoscopes, name generators, games, and jokes. Where you find opportunities to establish community, you'll see familiar Internet offerings including clubs, chat rooms, and instant messaging (with contact books). And, where news and information is your entertainment you'll find directories, directions, sports, news, and weather ­ all fully integrated.

Sonera Zed has proven themselves in eight cultures within the 18­26-year-old markets they target. Asked to validate a commonly stated premise that youth's lack of preconceived notions about mobile entertainment (and technology in general) leads to their easy acceptance of the medium, Hughes responds that, "It's fact, not fiction."

At this point, Hughes says, we're talking about people who say, "Oh, by the way, phones also make phone calls. So when you're not doing cool things like putting the latest Shaggy ringtone down there or putting out a parental-advisory explicit-content graphic (a nude) on your phone, or SMS-ing someone with the answers to the test, or flirting with someone, or looking up cool horoscopes, you're probably making a phone call. While Grandma and Grandpa are still trying to figure out how to program that VCR, it's happening."

Demographics or Psychographics?
However, not everyone identifies a demographic market. Tyrone Lam, president of Buzztime Entertainment (subsidiary of the familiar NTN Communications), identifies a psychographic market: "Because we have a large audience in kids," he says, "'tweens, teens, young adults, men and women, people who love sports, people who love TV, whatever it is, we have trivia to fit every demographic that there is. It's really the psychographic, someone who does have some free time, [is] competitive, obviously likes to promote or tout what they know in terms of trivia, and people who like to be social but maybe don't have the right place to be social in terms of trivia."

Who is Buzztime? As Lam puts it, "If you've ever been to a bar or restaurant and played trivia on the television set, that's us." Now they're bringing trivia to mobile entertainment.

Wireless Video: Fast-Emerging Niche
Another niche mobile entertainment provider, Generic Media, offers its customers the gMovie product. Stuart Wong, Generic's strategic marketing manager, offers a bird's-eye view of their market analysis: "There are a lot of people who own Palm handheld devices and tend to be on the leading edge of technology," he says. "[They] like to have the latest gadgets. The ability to play back video with audio on their handheld device is pretty compelling for them. So a lot of it's been home video users, people who own digital video cameras, or people who tend to watch movie trailers off the Internet. It's relatively straightforward to take a movie trailer for any type of home video and then convert that to the gMovie format using our gMovie Maker software, and then play it back using gMovie Player."

The gMovie Maker and gMovie Player software products work with your desktop video for conversion to a format suitable for playback on Palm handheld devices.

Kids Will Lead the Wireless Charge
So why is the U.S. still behind Japan and Europe in mobile entertainment? Is it lagging technology or a combination of cultural and geographical marketplace disparities?

Part of the reason the Japanese are ahead stems from the fact that Japan has no wired, underground telephone infrastructure as we do here in the U.S. In addition, any Internet connectivity for the PC is charged by the minute or in bulk at a premium. So this hulking population has swarmed on wireless phone technology, both for communications and Internet access, easily becoming the predominant market in mobile entertainment as well. "Japan is so massive," says Andy Nulman, president of Airborne Entertainment (Montreal,Canada). "Over 53% of mobile phone use [there] is for entertainment. Mobile data service is for entertainment. And over 90% of that is for paid premium content. It's a great and booming industry over there."

What's more, Nulman adds, they're only really marketing it [mobile entertainment] to a small segment of the population.

Nulman's take on the U.S. lag in mobile entertainment is that it's all just a question of timing. "Everyone says, and I think it's [a] fallacy, that it's a different marketplace and culturally we're different ­ we take fewer buses and subways in North America than they do in Japan. Let's face it, we're dealing with a global universe. I can give you tons of examples of hardware and software that have made their way over from Japan through Europe to here."

Mobile Entertainment Will Spread Virally
Painting a picture of the ensuing, viral spread of mobile entertainment toward the U.S., Nulman puts it this way: "What happens is usually something will begin in a specific pocket and be exploited elsewhere. [In] the world of entertainment it's usually North America that has the lead. The Hollywood element exploits that and markets it around the world. We're seeing a little different [pattern] these days."

What Nulman means specifically is that kids, motivated by their natural curiosity and instant attraction to technology (like the Internet), are the source of this entertainment groundswell.

"They're the ones who are going to lead the wireless charge," he continues. "People who have it now are not necessarily going to be the market in three or four or five years. But the kids are going to lead the charge just the way they've led the charge on virtually any other entertainment form. That's our saving grace. The only thing that separates North America and Europe and Japan in wireless use is the timing. It's coming here."

Asked what, if anything, separates the markets culturally or geographically, Sonera Zed's Hughes, is firm: "Nothing," he says. "That's a loaded answer there. One must remember that entertainment, as long as you can find it and it's fun to play ­whether you're Japanese, American, or European ­ you'll play it. Ringtones, games, and instant messaging, those are popular everywhere you go, every time, so there's nothing as long as you stick to those tenets."

Hughes explains that there are massive differences, however, in handsets and which ones actually do gaming, SMS, and ringtones. "The limitations aren't really the cultural boundaries," he continues, "but what's interesting is that the limitations have to do with handsets and network ability. So I answer the question from a customer point of view: young adults are young adults and the same things appeal cross-culturally."

He adds as an aside that he had to learn this the hard way. "I felt that Americans were very different from Japanese and Europeans. I found out in the last year that I couldn't be more wrong. What I have found out is that there are no good handsets in the U.S. that do the same things they do in Japan or in Europe, and that the networks have limitations. So if I'm answering your question correctly, which I hope that I am, there's not a big difference. It's a hardware and a network limitation or barrier."

Hardware/Network Limitations
What are the hardware and network limitations and why are they there in the first place?

Where Europe and Japan were each early adopters of a single standard ­ GSM and i-mode respectively ­ the U.S. infrastructure is divided among many standards. The FCC allotted regions for competing telcos to each establish their own competing (and, unfortunately, conflicting) standards, consisting of analog and some digital technologies.

Analog was the cheapest way to go, extending the current technology of the plain old telephone service. Digital was considered too costly to implement and that has left us with comparatively little digital coverage in the U.S. even today. Multiple standards in the U.S. gravitate from GSM to TDMA and CDMA. Where foreign governments took more leadership in these matters, enabling a single standard, we have taken a hands-off approach, creating a chaos that may not be quickly overcome. In contrast, the adoption of a single standard paved the way for easy growth of hardware and content in each of those marketplaces.

With this lesson now partially learned, the smell of all that money being made abroad should drive corrective action here, and quickly.

U.S. Content Is Already First Class
We have some wonderful mobile entertainment content in the U.S. right now.

Buzztime's offering (interactive trivia games over mobile phones, just like those played on TVs on the NTN Network in bars and restaurants across the U.S.) is available nationwide. "If you have a WAP-enabled phone today you can play Buzztime trivia," says president Tyrone Lam. "It's mobile.buzztime.com and if you have a Sprint PCS service it's actually listed in entertainment: games and sports."

The price is definitely right: for those using the service on a WAP-enabled phone, it's still free! That's so Buzztime can get their name out there. They also want to learn as much about the wireless market as possible. Lam feels it won't be too long before they can charge for the service.

The gMovieMaker and Player are modestly priced software packages (free trial download; $29.97 to license the Maker). These Generic Media products are available for both Windows and Macintosh. Though there's a 30-day trial limitation on the Maker, and there are some limited functions, you'll be able to make a well-informed decision as to whether you want to purchase the package for the modest licensing fee.

"The gMovie Player is available from our Web site for free," says Wong. "It's freely distributable and can be installed on any Palm OS device for playback of the gMovie files. The gMovie Player supports audio playback through the pinhole speaker on all Palm OS devices."

Wong also tantalizingly mentions something still in R&D: "I guess I can hint at streaming support for Palm OS devices. That's under development and we should be announcing something later, in a month or so," he says.

A partnership with Sony bundles the Maker and Player software with the Sony Clie as of the second quarter of this year. The Maker and Player are also bundled with the MemPlug Smart Media from Portable Innovation, Hong Kong.

Business and technological chains vary. Wong was kind enough to provide us with an illustration of a possible technological chain for Generic Media:

The point for potential providers and consumers is this: the people in the mobile-entertainment business are all set up and ready to go. They know where and how their business and technology needs will be met and whose needs in the chain they'll be meeting, and can easily follow the path to the waiting consumer. Why? Because the business is so well established in other parts of the world, we know that it's a given. When we do find out when we in the U.S. will enjoy all these marvels, we should be immediately bombarded with a plethora of them, glitches not included!

How about the Pocket BoxOffice content? Airborne's Andy Nulman explains: "Whether you want to play persistent interactive games or get information, gossip, laugh, learn something," he says, "you can read, you can interact, vote in polls, respond to quizzes, and take tests; you can personalize with ringtones and screen savers, you can collect stuff, you can meet people, you can discover things you never knew. You can purchase stuff, you can play games alone or with thousands of others, you can communicate; there's so much you can do."

Platform Preeminent: InfoSpace
You might not yet be convinced that a mobile entertainment explosion is heading our way. But what if you were told about a major Internet player that has survived the dot-com downtrend (drown trend)? One that had partnerships in place with every major U.S. carrier except Sprint and Nextel?

Ever heard of InfoSpace? InfoSpace is powering the private-labeled portals for most major carriers' mobile devices. They aren't the only platform preeminents in play, but if you have a WAP-enabled phone from most major carriers, you have or will be able to get InfoSpace-powered content from your service. Let's name the carriers: AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Verizon, Alltel, Qwest and VoiceStream are all partnered with InfoSpace. Similar to Sonera Zed, their work has already proven itself in foreign markets before being brought home. What Europe, South America, and Australia already have, we will now be seeing from InfoSpace, here.

Seeing Things from a Carrier/Subscriber Perspective
Rather than being just an entertainment provider per se, InfoSpace is helping carriers and developers bring mobile entertainment to end users. "We try to look at things from a carrier and a subscriber perspective," says InfoSpace's Richard Cahill. "A carrier has got an entire array of offerings; games and entertainment [are] really a subset of their whole service. And we want to provide the carrier with the tools to make that an easy end-user experience."

"For example," Cahill continues, "when I [as a consumer] turn around and register for mobile wireless services at a carrier, I want that one registration process to provision all of the services that I'm ultimately going to want. So if there's a wireless carrier [that] has four different providers of game services, rather than having to register at each one, [we] leverage that existing registration process, and then I can play game A from provider B and I don't have to register at an individual level for any of the games."

Everyone's Joining the MobEnt Party
Every part of the industry is gearing up to bring mobile entertainment to the U.S. in a big way, with sundry software developers now jumping on the bandwagon.

Synovial Inc., for example, provides a mobile entertainment application developer's toolkit, already in use by a major player, and Synovial is confident enough to offer it free and take a piece of the royalty action instead.

"We just signed a development deal with SEGA," says David Gasior, manager of developer relations for Synovial. "We have actually worked with them to bring the SEGA Game Gear games to the handheld market. Using our toolkit we've created a product called Virtual Game Gear that allows people to play Game Gear games on their Pocket PCs. Soon they'll also be available for Symbian OS­based devices, which are very popular in Europe."

Synovial's contribution is a programming language API. Use of this API permits developers to write their application in a single code and have it work across several different programming language platforms.

If you're that developer, says Gasior, here's all you need: "Basically you would have copies of Microsoft Windows CE Development Kit and Symbian OS Development Kit, which are both available free of charge from their respective vendors. Then you install our development kit, which basically is the API that you would write to, and the reason that you would still need the Microsoft and Symbian development kits is because they provide emulators. That way, if you don't have an actual device you're still able to run your application inside these emulators for actual testing purposes."

"So then you'd write to our stuff," Gasior continues. "We would actually do the compiling to the programming environment whether it's Microsoft Visual C++ or one of the tools from Borland. Then the games you create don't necessarily need to use our Syn Server functionalities. They can be standalone and we actually include all the libraries necessary for getting the application to run on the devices you've targeted."

M-Entertainment Is Coming...But It's Still 18 Months Away
The carriers are involved, the platform developers are involved, and the individual game and entertainment developers are involved. It really is coming here.

Like so many technologies in the marketplace, the devices and content described in this article will spread across the United States, changing the cultural landscape in as little as 18 months.

Though that growth was expected to be at a peak by now, it is actually beginning here now and growing toward that peak. It's a matter of timing, as Airborne's Andy Nulman says.

"Over the last two years everyone was predicting a massive explosion and quite frankly, that hasn't occurred," concurs Paul Hughes of Sonera Zed.

"We see that it's going to be 18­24 months for this thing to reach critical mass," he explains. "What we're doing is positioning ourselves at the early side, now that the playing field has been cleared of some competitors and there's some sensibility returning to the marketplace. We believe by staying focused on our customers, understanding what they find fun and exciting, and determining how to drive revenue, that's what's going to create the greatest value for operators and customers. But it will take 18­24 months for this thing to reach critical mass."

As with the Internet, the next generation of cell phones will grow, moving beyond WAP. These phones will be able to download and install games onto cellular devices that can then be played with or without a wireless connection. This is a stage of development, which will in turn make room for another.

Much of the content from some providers is what Buzztime's Tyrone Lam called "repurposed content" ­ content that's simply been adjusted from the medium it was originaly created for, to the mobile device medium. "But once we get to this new phone technology where the consumer can download the application [we can] offer a lot more in terms of promotions and competitions and graphics," he continues, "all the bells and whistles that come with fun, play-along trivia games like we have in the bars and restaurants."

"We'll have the value there that should support a business model," contends Lam, "where we can start charging a premium either for just Buzztime or as part of a bundled ser-vice. Enough money to [enable us to] put more resources on the project. Really what we're doing now is working with the various technology companies and content aggregators as well as the wireless carriers and just telling them some of the really good data that we've gotten over the last six months from the usage of our service, and then trying to parlay that into a better business deal for us."

Parlay on.

SIDEBAR
How To Get Involved
So how do you get all these fun content toys to play with?

Most Nokia phones with AT&T Wireless service have the Sonera Zed ringtones and graphics. There's also a Mitsubishi phone with AT&T service that supports WAP. The list is on AT&T's site at www.attws.com.

You should also take a look at www.zed.com. This service add-on offers unlimited use with the following price structure: 3 months service for $6.99, 6 months for $11.99, and a year for $19.99. This includes all the applications discussed at the beginning of this article except for the ringtones and graphics ­ they're charged separately.

We've already mentioned that Buzztime trivia offerings are available at mobile.buzztime.com (just making sure you're paying attention!).

Airborne Entertainment's Pocket BoxOffice is available over Web-enabled devices with the following wireless carriers: Verizon, Qwest, Cingular, Sprint, Alltel, to name the major players, as well as other wireless services listed at www.airborne-e.com/carriers.html.

With InfoSpace you can not only trust that they are the platform for most carriers but you'll also see some familiar Internet-based ser-vices from them on your WAP phone.

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