Interview with Rann Smorodinsky and Steffen Leistner from the Mobile Entertainment Forum

Smorodinsky: Mobile entertainment is a huge market. Depending on which market forecast you consult, the estimates are in the range of 5 billion to 11 billion dollars until 2005-2007. Since I entered this business in early 2000, the market has grown by 10,000 percent up to now. Entertainment has evolved from TV, the computer and Internet to mobile handsets. Mobile entertainment has the advantage that it is very pervasive.

Smorodinsky: The main drivers are the amazing availability and connectivity of mobile devices. Everyone has a mobile phone, and people have it with them and are connected 60 to 70 percent of the daytime. With your mobile handset you are part of one big family. You can use it for multiplayer games like ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, but also for offline games like ‘Tetris’. You can then post your highest ‘Tetris’ score via mobile. Chatting alongside the game and meeting others is also an important factor.

Smorodinsky: A main issue here is that two completely different industries, the network operator and the media industry, have to co-operate. Entertainment people and operators sometimes look down on each other and often don’t speak the same language. There is a wide cultural gap. If a game producer talks to a telecoms engineer, they might have a completely different notion of what, for example, ‘publishing’ means. The Mobile Entertainment Forum tries to bridge this gap between the two cultures. We have defined a common terminology, which is documented in a glossary of mobile entertainment terms.

There are also technological obstacles: Digital Rights Management, download compatibility, super-distribution protections, lack of standardisation, and different colour schemes. For one mobile application, a developer may have to design 20 different versions.

Smorodinsky: It is incorrect to perceive them as substitutes. I see a positive correlation between them.

Leistner: The technology discussion, mainly driven by operators or technology providers over the last couple of years, led to an overall confusion of end customers. Operators felt the customer reluctance to deal with underlying technologies very well and are shifting their message away from putting technologies first to putting application and the consumer experience first. This also means that in the future it will become more and more irrelevant which technology is behind your application: fixed like ADSL or fibre, mobile like GPRS or UMTS, semi mobile like Wi-Fi. New devices, different pricing models ― this all leads to a scenario to best meet the customer need and create a great experience or just fun.

Leistner: Clearly nobody will carry a 50-inch flat screen with a surround system to get the home entertainment experience at any place, even if the mobile technology would provide this option. Main drivers behind this new area of mobile entertainment are increased mobility of people and the emergence of applications and devices as the technology becomes more and more standard and widely available. So it is a new world and still in its infancy compared to, for example, home entertainment and therefore offering a much greater growth potential.

Smorodinsky: I don’t use mobile devices for entertainment myself, but I am a big believer in mobile entertainment. Sober analysis has shown me that this is a big business. I love to watch my three kids play; they are four to nine years old. They like to play Java games on their mobile handsets. They even play on their mobile at home, though they could use the computer. Research shows that users in general play on their mobile phones most of the time from 5 to 7 p.m., when most of them are at home. 

The interview was conducted by Milon Gupta.