Hip cell phones will have it all
Video, songs at your fingertips
By Clint Swett -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee

SAN FRANCISCO - If you carry a cellular phone, consider yourself a
target audience.

Entertainment companies - ranging from MTV to Napster and Disney to
ESPN - are revving up to sell music, videos, news clips, games and
even movie tickets to the world's nearly 2 billion cellular
subscribers.

Sell It Yourself
Unlike years gone by, the buzz at this week's Cellular Telephone &
Internet Association, or CTIA, trade show isn't about cellular towers
or the alphabet soup of wireless technology. Instead, it's about ring
tones, music downloads and video clips, plus dozens of other cell
phone add-ons that many experts see as the industry's future.

"At the end of the day, the mobile phone is the device you don't leave
home without," said Motorola executive Alberto Moriondo. "It's like
your keys or your wallet."

This convergence of technology and entertainment is fueled by the
explosive growth of cellular phone service and increasingly
sophisticated phones that can handle the new offerings.

With more than 196 million wireless users in the United States and
nearly 2 billion worldwide, entertainment companies see a huge
potential audience. And the wireless companies are only too eager to
partner with them.

"This is potentially a multibillion-dollar market," said Napster Inc.
President Brad Durea. "It's an incredible opportunity."

There's no question that cellular users are willing to pay for their
entertainment. Ring tones have become a big business, with some 17
million users in the United States downloading musical clips every
month, said Seamus McAteer, an analyst with market research firm
M:Metrics. They're paying as much as $3 each for every ring tone on
their list.

Those kind of numbers have emboldened entertainment companies to make
big bets on the wireless market.

Recording giant Warner Music Group and MTV Networks announced Sunday
that they're teaming up, with Warner providing the music and MTV
offering the brief, under-four-minute-long videos that will be beamed
to cellular phone subscribers.

Billboard magazine is launching a monthly service, initially with
Cingular, where users can listen to music samples, review lists of
top-rated tunes, look up concert schedules and download ring tones,
all from one screen on their wireless phones. In first place this week
on Billboard's list of "Hot Ringtones": "Gold Digger" by hip-hop
artist Kanye West.

Meanwhile, industry giants Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel and
Cingular are expected to launch music download services within the
next few months.

Even Napster, once the renegade of the music industry, has plans for a
service in which subscribers can buy a song and download it to both
their PC and their wireless phone. The company expects to launch its
service within nine months, Durea said.

The latest surge in cellular entertainment can be credited to
technical improvements in both cellular phones and the networks they
run on, said Clint Wheelock, an analyst with the NPD Group. With
larger and brighter screens, plenty of memory and powerful
microprocessors, today's cell phones have become "mobile computing
devices," Wheelock said. "They are at the level PCs were a few years
ago."

The big cellular companies like Sprint Nextel, Verizon Wireless and
Cingular Wireless are rapidly building fast networks that can push
data at broadband speeds to those phones. After spending billions of
dollars to build up those networks, the companies now need data-loving
subscribers to help pay off those costs.

Some innovations, such as downloading entire songs to the phone via
the wireless network, seem destined for success, experts say. "Mobile
music will be big. People will spend money to have music on their cell
phones," said Stephen Wellman, executive editor at Fierce Wireless, a
cellular industry newsletter.

Games designed for wireless phones also are expected to surge. Such
heavyweights as Electronic Arts Inc., Marvel Enterprises and THQ
International are heavily involved in game development. One research
group, In-Stat/MDR, predicts that game revenue will grow eightfold to
$1.8 billion by 2009.

But experts are divided about the market for watching TV clips on a
screen that's smaller than a soda cracker. "Nobody will want to watch
TV on their cell phones," Wellman said. "The screens are just too
small."

NPD analyst Wheelock, however, said TV cell phone services - which
already feature clips and programming from CNN, ESPN and MSNBC - will
find a niche, especially as the images become less jerky and more like
regular TV.

Users, he said, might whip out their phones to watch a clip while
waiting in line for a latte or to board a plane. "This won't be a
replacement for TV at home, but it will be a supplement," he said. "We
call it digital snacking."

For any services to catch fire with the public, however, they will
have to become much simpler.

There are hundreds of different phone models in use, with varying
capabilities. Many users don't even know if their phones can play ring
tones, much less display video clips or download games. Said Wheelock,
"This will be a source of a lot of confusion for a lot of consumers."

HOT RINGS
Top ring tones reported in Billboard magazine's Oct. 1 issue.

1. "Gold Digger" Kanye West, featuring Jamie Foxx

2. "Shake It Off" Mariah Carey

3. "Let Me Hold You" Bow Wow, featuring Omarion

4. "Back Then" Mike Jones

5. "Don't Cha" The Pussycat Dolls, featuring Busta Rhymes

6. "We Belong Together" Mariah Carey

7. "Super Mario Brothers Theme" Koji Kondo

8. "Gasolina" Daddy Yankee

9. "Just A Lil Bit" 50 Cent

10. "Halloween" John Carpenter

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"The pressure is outrageous. Everyone is picked apart and it's so superficial and not real. I'm not superskinny and not overweight. I'm just normal."
-- Hilary Duff


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