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Sep. 22, 2008

The MEF (Mobile Entertainment Forum) will be very busy in the next couple of weeks, as it will be trying to find a consensus on how to report on mobile content sales in a way that will satisfy both content providers and wireless carriers alike.

Last week, the MEF held meetings in San Francisco to coincide with the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show.

Content sales reporting emcompasses almost every type of monetization, including mobile advertising.

The MEF has been working on this project for a whole year and expects to have something to announce in the first quarter of 2009. The effort is both global and local in nature – some parts transcend geographical boundaries, while others need to be localized.

In the U.S. alone, a handful of major wireless carriers exist alongside hundreds of mobile content owners, and it would be cost and resource-prohibitive for the carriers to try to meet all the different requests from content providers, explained Suhail Bhat, director of Policy and Initiatives at MEF.

Overall, it is the job of the MEF to consider all those content reporting requests and boil them down into a reasonable number that carriers can manage.

Bhat said “it’s a very important piece of work and what the MEF comes up with is not the be all to end all but if it can achieve some kind of consensus on specific minimum requirements, that will be nothing short of remarkable."

In the field of mobile video, a lot of interest and questions exist around the revenue and business models – should it be subscription-based or pay-per-view and what specific model or models work best?

The MEF is attempting to help all market players sift through the mountain of data and plans to tap into a form of graduate school of business for help in modeling the mobile video market.

Additionally, the MEF is working with the NPD Group to put together a mobile games sales chart that will probably be ready by the middle of next year, according to Karen Allen, MEF’s general manager for the Americas.

Educational initiatives also are under way to create various tutorials that explain for content owners how the wireless industry works as well as on mobile marketing and advertising.

Bhat added that "the MEF isn't doing its work just to give market participants a lot of white papers to read. This is very much engaging with the industry, which includes workshops, round tables, case studies and more as part of the overall process."

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Source: The Mobile Entertainment Forum.