Business Idea: 3G Content Provider

TommyK

Hi All,

I've been wondering a lot about the advent of 3G mobile phones and how they might present themselves as a good business opportunity for people with existing intellectual propoerties.

I've been reading a short report about a Japanese man who wrote a mini-novle that went out to hundreds of thousands of Japanese teenages who read it in portions on their mobile phones.

I can think of a few booklets and other little publications that I have that might make good content for future 3G phones here in Ireland and even abroad where such technologies are in use right now.

I'm not quite sure how to start though - I've contact a few companies but have no replies yet.

Does anyone have any ideas about the viability of this?

Some kind of reveue sharing partnership with a telephone company having a large number of existing customers would be a perfect expansion of the "same product-many formats" line of thinking that I'm trying to follow.

I've even thought of approaching one of those companies that currently provide SMS premium services as I have products that could be broken into bite-size chunks for an SMS series.

Getting a few thousand (or even a few hundred!) people paying even 1 or 2 Euros a month would be better than a smaller number of higher-value payments (Yeah, I know that contradicts many people's assertions about pursueing the "big money" but you never know without testing!).

Does anyone have any idea of how best to focus my efforts to simply get started with this!?

Regards,
Tommy.

ionapaul

Rather than immediately contacting the network companies directly, contact some of the existing content providers (not necessarily 3G content) to see if they would be interested in what you're saying, or if they would be willing to partner or even share information with you. I am not a heavy mobile user (I don't like the things to be honest) but it seems to me the most widely used content providers (other than content from the networks themselves) are the independant tone providers. You would definitely be seeking the same demographic as they do, right, teenagers mainly. I don't believe adults will pay for fiction via their phone (the screen is WAAAAYYYYY too small and you can already buy mini-books if size is a problem, not that regular books are that massive). On the other hand, non-fiction like mini-travel guides (with maps) would be ideal for 3G phones. Maybe self-help stuff too, you know 10 great sales techniques or 15 questions you need to prepare before that big interview...:) I think adults would go for that stuff no problem.

Victor

Originally posted by TommyK
I've been wondering a lot about the advent of 3G mobile phones and how they might present themselves as a good business opportunity for people with existing intellectual propoerties.

One content provider is actually selling passages of the Koran by premium SMS.

There are lots of possibilities out there.

antoinolachtnai

well, setup costs are pretty high, and you the mobile operator tends to end up holding on to a very large proportion of the money. The VAT man also takes his share. So you need to be doing some decent quantity (at least thousands, possibly tens of thousands per month) to make the whole thing worthwhile. You also have to have some way to market the content, which pushes the cost base up again.