Mobile entertainment is for doers, not thinkers

In the heart of the world’s entertainment capital, Paul Reddick told content providers it was time to show him the money.

The vice president of business development and product innovation at Sprint Nextel Corp. took to the stage at Monday’s MECCA event dressed as Will Farrell’s Ricky Bobby of “Talladega Nights” fame to discuss the prospects of mobile entertainment. But in order for next-generation entertainment applications to reach their full potential, he said, studios and record labels will have to invest more marketing dollars.

“If you really look at marketing dollars (spent promoting mobile content), the carriers are picking it up,” Reddick stated during his keynote address. “But frankly, we shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden” alone.

The economics of marketing mobile content have long been a headache the wireless industry—smaller content providers such as game publishers continue to implore carriers to put more muscle behind mobile games in the form of advertising dollars; operators, in turn, are hoping to tap the enormous budgets of film studios and music companies to push next-generation 3G offerings such as TV and full-track downloads.

“Don’t price us out of the market,” Reddick implored. “Market your mobile entertainment. This stuff won’t market itself.”

Perhaps surprisingly, some content providers agreed with Reddick.

“As the world’s largest music company, we try to take some responsibility for (creating) digital demand for our product,” said Rio Caraeff, vice president and general manager of Universal Music Mobile, during a session following Reddick’s keynote. “But I think we’re not doing enough about that.”

But that’s changing, Caraeff claimed, as the label begins to work with online music services and mobile operators to promote artists and their offerings across platforms. The company last year launched exclusive voicetones, ringtones and ring-back tones to support a greatest-hits offering from Eminem, and Caraeff outlined plans to support a new release from Snoop Dogg this fall with a campaign using short codes.

Each player hopes the colliding worlds of video, music, games and other content helps free up more marketing dollars, particularly for high-profile, branded applications. Glu Mobile has built an impressive portfolio of licensed titles, including a handful of games based on Fox hits such as “Robots,” “Ice Age 2” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Glu Chief Executive Officer Greg Ballard said that while “it’s everybody’s responsibility” to market wireless games, such campaigns can be more effective—and, perhaps, less costly overall—for games based on well-known properties.

“We bring the largest brands to carriers,” Ballard said. “Carriers throughout the world saw the opportunity to cross-promote (‘Robots’) with a large film company.”

Of course, marketing high-profile mobile content could bring headaches of its own. Operators may look to movie studios to promote games such as “The Fast and the Furious” or “Lord of the Rings,” but filmmakers may view such offerings as eye-catching titles for which carriers should shoulder the marketing load.

But if marketing issues are a speed bump for the content market, Reddick said, digital rights management problems are handcuffs. Indeed, the standoff continues between a consortium of wireless powerhouses and MPEG LA, a licensing clearinghouse that holds patents for Open Mobile Alliance-supported DRM technology. The groups have failed to come to terms regarding royalties for the OMA standard, and wireless operators and content providers have deployed a host of proprietary anti-piracy solutions as negotiations flounder.

The result, some analysts say, is a fragmented market that effectively locks content down to one platform—angering consumers and slowing sales.

“The biggest bottleneck (in mobile content) is not the technology; the biggest bottleneck is the complexity of wireless rights,” said Reddick. “The wireless industry needs help from the entertainment industry in making these rights easier to manage.”