Pipeline Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 11

	This Month's Issue:
	Cableco vs. Telco vs. Everyone

News on the Move: From CTIA and Beyond

By Phil Britt

This month, we got a number of reminders that consumers continue to want all the functionality they have at home and at the office available anytime, anywhere. Video and other mobile applications will continue to accelerate, as the presentations, announcements, and product launches at CTIA Wireless 2010 showed, which, of course, means a corresponding increased need for OSS/BSS services.

The new products are likely to accelerate an already strong wireless market. According to CTIA's semi-annual survey, wireless data service revenues increased 25.7 percent from the last half of 2008 to reach more than $22 billion for the last half of 2009. Wireless data revenues, for all non-voice services, were more than 28 percent of all wireless service revenues. In addition, there are now more than 257 million data-capable devices in consumers' hands, up from 228 million at the end of 2008. Fifty million of these devices are smart phones or wireless-enabled PDAs and nearly 12 million are wireless-enabled laptops, notebooks or aircards.

According to the survey, text messaging continues to be enormously popular, with more than 822 billion text messages sent and received on carriers' networks during the last half of 2009–amounting to almost 5 billion messages per day at the end of the year. During the 2009 calendar year, there were more than 1.5 trillion text messages reported on carriers' networks. Wireless subscribers are also sending more pictures and other multimedia messages with their mobile devices – more than 24.2 billion MMS messages were reported for the last half of 2009. That's more than double the number from the previous year, when only 9.3 billion were reported for the last half of 2008.

More, Faster Video
"With 4G truly being multimedia and all about video distribution, this is the time the cable companies need to move into wireless because that is their core business – video distribution," said Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint. "Adding their volume and their distribution to

There are now more than 257 million data-capable devices in consumers' hands.

the network was a very big plus. We share some of the same competitors, so getting them into our camp made sense with respect to 4G."

Within the next two years, rate plans will move from how many minutes or text messages per month to how many gigabytes per month, Hesse predicted.

The amount of gigabytes per month is likely to accelerate as an increasing amount of video content becomes available for wireless devices.

Eric Burger, senior vice president, digital networks, for Sony TV Pictures, said that mobile video is something that consumers definitely want, "we are not guessing any more. As an industry, we need to find a way to address that capacity (issue)."

Content Ownership Issues Continue
Another issue the industry needs to address in more detail is the ownership of content, which was an issue with the Oscars in March and the Masters golf tournament in April.

Disney, which owns the rights to the Oscars, and Cablevision battled into the first couple of minutes of the program regarding fees; only a last-minute agreement saved Cablevision subscribers from missing the program.

Similarly, cable companies had the opportunity to show the Masters in 3D, though Time Warner opted to stay with the traditional broadcast, while satellite subscribers had no access to the 3D transmission. Comcast handled the distribution, but the content itself was owned by Augusta National Golf Club, site of the golf tournament.

Danny Briere, CEO of TeleChoice, expects the Oscars and the Masters to be a sign of things to come in the battle over content ownership.

"Everyone wants to get their two cents out of the deal," Briere says. "The thing right now

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