Opinion: Smart phones are known for their video capabilities, but they might also have an impact on content distribution.Since the advent of online media, traditional media such as books, magazines and newspapers have had a hard time. Advertising revenues have fallen off, readership for established titles has declined or shown little growth, and some newly established outlets for text-centric media, such as e-books, have not really lived up to their promise.
Yet, paradoxically, we read more then at any time in history, and I am not only talking about e-mail. Blogs, Web sites, newsgroups, mailing lists: The amount of text-based information we consume is perfectly staggering.
Surprisingly, however, most of this information is consumed either on the screen of a computer or on paper; the multitude of devices predicted for accessing content has not really materialized in a major way so far. E-books have negligible market share. Pod-casting is an interesting phenomenon, but we have yet to see it materialize as a major way of accessing information.
Things may change, however, when third-generation mobile phones start gaining major traction. In Europe, 3G technology has been rolled out in France, Austria and other countries, and the marketing pitch for these devices is mostly centered on the video capabilities provided by the higher bandwidth.
Is the U.S. wireless industry catching up on 3G? Click here to find out.
But there may be an interesting angle for content producers, and more specifically bloggers, here. There are two areas of interest: There is, of course, the high-speed, always-on Internet access that 3G networks promise, and the second essential aspect is screen size. Most 3G phones arriving on the market today have screens that are significantly better and offer higher resolution than those on older phones. Squeezing a normal Web page onto such a screen will remain challenging, but the same is not true for RSS feeds and blogs.
In fact, it could well be that blogging becomes a killer app for 3G phones. The phenomenon of pod-casting shows that there is growing interest in pushing information to users in a variety of ways, but it is limited by the complexity of actually getting the information and transferring it to a mobile device. (Not a big hurdle for the budding nerd, but not what one would call mass-market ease of use).
3G telephony and recent smart phones could become a platform of choice for bloggers. We have already seen what impact a technology such as SMS messaging can have in some market segments.
So are we going to see smart phones as a content platform? It is too early to tell, but as the technology matures, the feature mix provided by 3G telephony could encourage unexpected usage patterns in the consumer market.
Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
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