As the cellular world moves quickly into offering commercial TV services, it is flanked by fixed network operators implementing quadruple-play strategies, and content providers and web-based service providers implementing multi-channel approaches, as well as by the consumer electronics industry pushing into home networking. In our view, there are new forms of ‘mobility’ for digital content appearing across the consumers’ device and service ecosystem. These need to be well understood to make sense of the future converged world. This report takes a user-focused look at the issues and opportunities, then develops some scenarios for how they will unfold.

This report has shown us that this is a large, complicated area inhabited by players that come from several distinct industries – TV, PCs, cellular, other consumer electronics and web-based services. Each of these is developing at a different speed and approaching it in a different way. We find that cellular operators and TV manufacturers are the groups that understand the new behaviours and mobility the least well. A number of vendors, especially those involved in cellular, have developed catchy visions for how the area will unfold. However, generally we find that players are nibbling away at parts of the issue and few are really trying to take an all-encompassing view and build their strategy on that.

Table of contents

Summary

More complicated usage patterns

Broader forms of mobility

Visions of how multimedia mobility will work

The shift from domain-centric devices to portable devices

Web-based services do not solve all the technical issues

Possession versus access – both will be popular

Understanding user behaviour better

The ‘long tail’
Ease of use will be essential
New behaviours will read across to other channels
Multi-channel strategies will be key for content providers

Scenarios

Scenario A: Microsoft World
Scenario B: Web-Gorilla World
Scenario C: Fragmented World
Technology areas supporting multimedia mobility